Advantage: Home Kitchen

[BadRabbit]

Real smoked barbecue.

Anyone with a cheap smoker can put out a better product than what passes for barbecue at restaurants in most metropolitan areas where they either can't or can't be bothered to do it right.

I'd say this totally depends on where you live. There are 5 places within driving distance of my house that make stuff that is quite literally mindblowing. It would take me 30 years to learn to do it as perfectly as they do.

[Dave the Cook]

So maybe it also depends on whether you've been working on your technique for 30 years?

And it also depends on your clientele. A lot of people are perfectly happy with average or even faked barbecue.

[lancastermike]

The coffee I make in my press pot is better than 99.9% of restaurants and better than a bunch of so called coffee shops as well.

Fresh beans properly ground made with good water at the proper temp steeped for the proper time. Most restaurants I go to don't really give fig about coffee service

Edited July 29, 2010 by lancastermike (log)

[paulraphael]

These dishes have one of three characteristics: (1) they require split-second timing and instant eating (eggs and toast) which most restaurants can't do very easily or (2) they have a cooking time from start to finish of 20+ minutes and require constant attention (risotto, saute dishes, pies) but don't reheat well and/or (3) they benefit from being cooked in "family-size" quantities (saute dishes, roasts) and can't be reheated in smaller quantities.

I think these points are the crux of it. A restaurant's limitations come from the nature of the a la carte workflow. The home kitchen's limitations have more to do with facilities, number of hands available, and the impracticality of making certain preparations on a small scale.

Home cooks get dismayed by haute cuisine recipes that involve half a dozen components on a plate, each one requiring many sub-components. Cooking like this for a dinner party is martyrdom, but at a restaurant with dozens cooks, each of whom preps for several hours, the result is an efficient workflow that allows last minute assembly of extremely complex plates.

[BadRabbit]

So maybe it also depends on whether you've been working on your technique for 30 years?

And it also depends on your clientele. A lot of people are perfectly happy with average or even faked barbecue.

True. I've had what passes for BBQ outside the south and it is just plain horrible.

[keri]

I think the key in the ice cream debate is texture. With better quality ingredients, you can get better flavor homemade, but the creamy texture depends largely on being able to cool the ice cream quickly so it becomes a matter of access to professional equipment. The best recipe and highest quality ingredients will make good ice cream at home, but not as good as it could be.

[baroness]

The coffee I make in my press pot is better than 99.9% of restaurants and better than a bunch of so called coffee shops as well.

Fresh beans properly ground made with good water at the proper temp steeped for the proper time. Most restaurants I go to don't really give fig about coffee service

Tea is truly dreadful when made carelessly; 99.95% of restaurants can't master the art of brewing tea. And they can't be troubled to use quality tea.

[scubadoo97]

The coffee I make in my press pot is better than 99.9% of restaurants and better than a bunch of so called coffee shops as well.

Fresh beans properly ground made with good water at the proper temp steeped for the proper time. Most restaurants I go to don't really give fig about coffee service

Coffee service at even a fine restaurant is dismal and even the coffee at "espresso bars" in many places is really bad. The latter is a product of the consumers love for frozen syrupy sweet coffee drinks and training that doens't go much beyond what the average consumer wants.

[paulraphael]

But restaurants can make excellent tea and coffee, and many do. Are we talking about areas where restaurants often slack off, or where they suffer some fundamental disadvantage compared with a home kitchen?

[scubadoo97]

Paul, I'd say a little bit of both. Many restaurants just don't devote enough attention to great coffee service using fresh high quality beans and they are not willing to provide fresh brewed coffee on demand. This is their fundamental disadvantage. Instead they have the big Bunn drip brewers and depending on how fast it's used can sit for a considerable time and scorch. I'm not saying it can't be done but it's not likely to happen. I've been to restaurants that provide individual coffee service using French press pots. I don't know the quality of the beans, how it was roasted or when it was roasted but at least it's a first step.

[goldie]

I think scrambled eggs are much better at home. Also, it is hard to find a perfectly cooked hard boiled egg. But that can be hard for some cooks to make...

Corn on the cob is always better at home as long as you are using fresh corn.

I think most pies are better at home, at least I have not had one in a restaurant better than mine or my mother's. I suppose there is a good reason for this: I'm only making one pie at a time generally so I can consider humidity, how sweet the berries or fruit is, basically I can tailor the recipe better to the ingredients.

Plain old chocolate chip, or peanut butter, or oatmeal cookies are almost always better at home. Smaller batches and real butter are probably why though. Plus you eat them warm out of the oven...

Actually, I think a big piece of this is volume- some things are ok, or even better, cooked in large quantities and other things suffer when cooked in large amounts.

[Peter the eater]

I prefer my home-cooked lobster to that of any restaurant I've experienced.

[paulraphael]

Paul, I'd say a little bit of both. Many restaurants just don't devote enough attention to great coffee service using fresh high quality beans and they are not willing to provide fresh brewed coffee on demand. This is their fundamental disadvantage.

Well, that's not a fundamental disadvantage. It's not based on inherent limitations of a restaurant (like being able to serve a perfectly roasted and rested goose, for example). It's a choice ... just a reflection of priorities.

I've had great coffee at restaurants. In some cases it was made to order in individual press pots. In others they had a high end espresso machine and gave the waitstaff barista training. And in others I have no idea what they did backstage.

Of course you don't see this kind of attention everywhere, because it's labor intensive. But so is everything that goes on in a good restaurant.

[kayb]

1. Fried okra. Most places, even in the South where they should know better, persist in serving the frozen, battered-and-fried, kind. Okra should be shaken in cornmeal before frying (or freezing on a cookie sheet, then transferred to a plastic bag.

2. An over easy egg. I've not found the restaurant yet that cooks its eggs in the drippings from the bacon or sausage that go with it. That, and timing, is the key to an excellent OE egg.

3. I agree with BadRabbit on barbecue. Depends entirely on where you are. I can find restaurants around here whose barbecue is as good as mine. But not better.

[Genkinaonna]

I absolutely agree with the toast and scrambled eggs...it seems like breakfast food in general is better at home, if only because you don't have to trouble yourself to get out of your pjs to eat it. Also, I have yet to find a restaurant where the desserts (pies and cakes especially) are better than those I make at home.

[David A. Goldfarb]

I think techniques like what Thomas Keller calls "big pot blanching"--i.e., blanching vegetables quickly in a large pot of salted water and then shocking them in ice water to keep the bright color, so they can be sauteed quickly for service--are great for restaurants that have to serve a lot of food quickly and make several complex dishes come out to the table at the same time, but judging by taste and texture alone, I'd rather have vegetables sauteed from raw and served à la minute, which is easily done at home, rather than blanched, shocked, held, and rewarmed.

Re: ice cream. I've been making ice cream for years, and it's true--any method that I've used that freezes a quart and a half of ice cream in 30-60 minutes just can't beat the smooth texture that a big professional freezer can get by freezing the same amount of ice cream in 5 minutes.

[cadmond]

This is probably variable on where you live, but where I live:

Tamales

99% of the time the restaurant tamales are dry and unpleasant.

while the ones I make at home are consistently moist and delicious (and lets be honest, I barely know what I'm doing when I make them)

I'm really not sure why my local restaurants have this problem when even the tamales I'm freezing and reheating are quite good. They only take 10 minutes or so to reheat in a steamer from the freezer, but I'm imagining that restaurants hold them at temp for service. Anyone know why are restaurant tamales so bad?

[paulraphael]

I think techniques like what Thomas Keller calls "big pot blanching"--i.e., blanching vegetables quickly in a large pot of salted water and then shocking them in ice water to keep the bright color, so they can be sauteed quickly for service--are great for restaurants that have to serve a lot of food quickly and make several complex dishes come out to the table at the same time, but judging by taste and texture alone, I'd rather have vegetables sauteed from raw and served à la minute, which is easily done at home, rather than blanched, shocked, held, and rewarmed.

Would be interesting to do a side-by-side. I think the pre-blanching method offers definite advantages for color, but I've never had a chance to compare flavor and texture.

Re: ice cream. I've been making ice cream for years, and it's true--any method that I've used that freezes a quart and a half of ice cream in 30-60 minutes just can't beat the smooth texture that a big professional freezer can get by freezing the same amount of ice cream in 5 minutes.

Even some cheap solutions can freeze ice cream quickly. My kitchenaid attachment freezes a batch in 8 to 12 minutes ... plenty fast. It's the lower end compressor machines (or canister machines that aren't cold enough) that seem to suffer in this regard.

Pastry chefs tend to use ingredients that are uncommon in most home ice cream recipes: most significant are stabilizers, nonfat dry milk, and alternative sugars like dextrose and invert syrup. These make a huge difference in texture. This doesn't represent a fundamental difference between home and restaurant, just a common one.

High end gelato machines and hardening cabinets represent a fundamental difference, although I think that their importance is minor when you're just making a quart or so at a time.

[maggiethecat]

I'm with baroness: I've never had a decent cuppa tea, let alone a great one, in a restaurant.And like goldie, I'll put up any double crust fruit pie coming from my kitchen against that of any professional baker's. (And I'm, at best, a journeywoman pastry chef.)

[David A. Goldfarb]

Would be interesting to do a side-by-side. I think the pre-blanching method offers definite advantages for color, but I've never had a chance to compare flavor and texture.

The key to getting good color without pre-blanching is knowing when to stop and being able to serve the vegetables right away, which is a lot easier at home, where presumably everyone at the table is eating the same thing, and plates aren't waiting at the pass, and there isn't a large distance between kitchen and table.