#masterchef tag

very interesting on masterchef australia elimination rounds when the challenge is "cook a dish from your family history" and, e.g., the first- or second-gen asian contestants end up at an advantage while the white australian contestants who grew up eating nan's overcooked beef mince in underseasoned tomato sauce have no real repository to draw on. it's always a white guy getting eliminated. andy allen is famous for teaching himself to cook because his family served up the creme de la creme of 1980s white australian ready-made excellence and that's the culinary heritage these contestants have. masterchef is in this interesting position of constantly elevating and calling back to "nostalgia" and "memory" as touchstones, "celebrating" the "traditional australian" staples like pavlova etc., while also making sure to uphold the melting-pot virtue of immigration and multiculturalism, but inadvertently their challenges end up showing how 2/3 of these categories, the culinary "nostalgia/memory" of non-white australians & their immigrant relatives, cast the culinary heritage of "traditional australia" (to say NOTHING of how the show deals with indigeneity) into doubt as a thing even worth cooking. i don't think they're being "subversive" on purpose but the message that invariably comes across is just "these dishes we revere as Classic Australian Food Taste Like Shit Compared To Any Cuisine Except, Like, The UK & Ireland" lol

guys i just had a real-life culinary revelation. so i made a black bean burger with wilted greens for breakfast and seasoned the greens with laoganma, salt, and mushroom powder, but it didn't taste how i imagined the flavor profile in my head, so i was like "how would a masterchef contestant conceptualize this problem," and my brain was like "it needs acid," so i added some lemon juice and understood immediately in practice in my human mouth what the judges are referring to when they say "the brightness from the citrus really lifts the dish and brings the other flavors forward." HOW DOES TASTE WORK. HOW IS PALATE FORMED

the more i learn about it the more it's actually fucking crazy how much (western) fine dining is the field that most keeps pace with / tracks 1:1 with trends in (western) theoretical humanities. they were doing deconstruction at the same time. they were doing "fusion"/"world literature" at the same time. they're doing farm-2-table/localvore shit and environmental/animal studies at the same time. food-as-Tradition may be a poor peg to hang your sociological hat on but food as Fashion in lockstep with sociology as Fashion. especially since the 1990s. buddy,

why is fine dining so minimalist. i understand that there is an aesthetic aspect to food presentation but at a certain point you're just serving midcentury modern on a plate. it's so pared back as to be nothing but a self-conscious commentary on its own restraint

why is a financier a type of cake but a diplomat a type of custard. who decides which professions are assigned to which types of french patisserie

realized last night--again, while watching masterchef--that my palate is probably as bizarre as it is because of all my childhood food allergies. i wasn't exposed to MANY common ingredients that give MANY foods their distinctive tastes and textures--i either avoided those foods or prepared them with hypoallergenic substitutes--and now the "regular" recipes are "off" to me, whether in flavor or mouthfeel. the example i used last night was butter--i actually prefer vegan pastry because too strong a butter flavor or flaky-fatty texture strikes my palate as "wrong," the same "spit it out" impulse you feel when you bite into a piece of fruit and find a mealy texture with the telltale taste of too-sweet rot. idk if anyone else with childhood food allergies experiences this, e.g., someone with an egg allergy instead of a casein one, but i have like a sixth sense for Secret Dairy because it makes things taste "off," even though i'm only mildly allergic as an adult.

today i learned that bergamot is a citrus fruit. for some reason since i'd only ever tasted it in earl grey tea i just assumed the flavor came from aromatic leaves with a citric fragrance, like lemon verbena. The More You Know!