Whats the most pretentious culinary buzzword?

Whats the most pretentious culinary buzzword?

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Famous

je ne sais quoi

Glazed

Deconstructed

truffle.

>classic image.jpg

reduction

The phrase I fucking hate the most is "flavor profiles".
Holy shit that one sends me.

Seasoning

This fits the definition of pretentious perfectly.

>attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed

Do you have a better word? I can't see how reducing water being called reduction is pretentious.

Hey dick.

Depends how you say it. I regard it in the same light as deja vu. But I've never used it, because I always sais quoi.

This entire thread is just crossboard Summer trolls trying to bait people who actually cook. Just hide/sage/report/ignore.

While I am fine with the term reduction, you have to admit that pretension has crept into the cooking world like mad the last ten years.
OP is right about mouthfeel. Its fucking bullshit.

Its fucking bullshit what?

Yeah, it's really bad when you say it with an obviously fake French accent, and swirl your hand in the air romantically.

"All you can eat". Because that's the height of pretentiousness - roping people who have no business going out to eat into doing so.

fuck I can't imagine saying it without doing the hand swirl

please euthanize me

Umami

"Authentic". Culinary history isn't relevant to actually cooking and eating things.

I dont like how much artisan/artisinal gets labelled on everything

Umamiposters are the worst!

>molecular gastronomy because everyone is fucking different and you cant satisfy everyone's objective preferences and digestion with science, people are just too varied
>paleo/keto because just fucking say high protein low carb moslty raw. the weight loss diet has been the same forever
>organic because its bullshit thanks to the FDA
>GMO because most people dont actually understand what it entails and how much it's already been done over the past thousand years

"'cago"

aioli

Pretentious

palate.

oooomaammii

"""flavor"""

Mouth watering

...

Cross breeding plants for stronger offspring is not the same thing as DNA modification that produces 0 variety in the crop grown.

This word is another way of saying "I'm too lazy to do it right."

That usually applies to things that are literally glazed.

Not a buzzword.

That applies to actual truffle.

Not a buzzword.

That applies to evaporating water from a sauce.

Not a buzzword.

>aioli
That's literally a thing.

Not a buzzword.

Vegan.

>If it's vegan, it's healthier, even though I will be hooked on dietary pills (drugs) for the rest of my retarded, chronically-ill vegan life.

>mouthfeel
sounds 1984 core

idk, a lot of places use "aioli" (such as the place i work) to mean "mayonnaise mixed with something else" as opposed to being a garlic based emulsion sauce.
ex. Sriracha aioli

my understanding is that aioli is just another fancier word for mayo
am I incorrect?

what word do anti fine dining fags use most? "pretentious"?

farm to table

expensive

It literally mean garlic and oil

Aioli is an emulsion, like mayo, but it's made with garlic, olive oil and whatever else is added.

>'za
It makes me irrationally mad and I hated it before it became a meme here.

gastropub

I hate "artisan" and "craft" are these buzzwords or actual things too?

Umami

"Pretentious" is kind of a bullshit term because it's meaning when applied to food is always subjective. To someone who regularly eats fast food the whole fast casual thing might seem pretentious. If you grew up with every meal served family style a meal served over several courses might seem pretentious. If you live on Sandra Lee level home cooking and dine out at chain restaurants white tablecloths and carefully plated dishes might seem pretentious to you. If you only eat at places where you order a la carte a tasting menu might seem pretentious to you.

Something can only be pretentious if it's being used to put on airs. The fact that words like deconstructed, truffle, reduction, flavor profile, umami and aioli are in this thread shows that many posters find restaurants run by actual chefs pretentious.

This says more about the posters themselves than what is or is not pretentious that they use terms identified with fine dining as examples of it. Obviously people with little or limited experience with fine dining, as correctly points out.

I don't see what's so pretentious about mouthfeel. It's basically just a way of saying how the food feels when you chew it.

Just say texture

Texture doesn't cover the same range of descriptions as mouthfeel, dumbshit.

Texture is good enough. Anything beyond that is pretentious.

...

>classic >classic image.jpg

>Aioli or aïoli (/aJˈoʊli/ or /eJˈoʊli/; Provençal Occitan: alhòli [aˈʎɔli] or aiòli [aˈjɔli]; Catalan: allioli [ˌaʎiˈɔɫi]) is a Mediterranean sauce made of garlic and olive oil and, in some regions other emulsifiers such as egg. The sauce's names mean "oil and garlic" in Catalan and Provençal. It is particularly associated with the cuisines of the Mediterranean coasts of Spain (Valencia, Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, Murcia and eastern Andalusia), France (Provence), and Italy (Liguria). French-Provençal versions of the sauce are typically closer to a garlic mayonnaise incorporating also egg yolks, and lemon juice, whereas the Spanish versions is without egg and has considerably more garlic. This gives it a more pasty texture, as well as making it considerably more laborious to make.[1][2][3][4] There are many variations, such as adding lemon juice or other seasonings.

Part of the reason "mouthfeel" sounds so jarring in English is because it's a completely unnecessary word when talking about Western cuisine. But once you get into Asian (particularly Chinese) food you realize English is missing an essential descriptive term, and that's why mouthfeel was coined.

We have the same problem talking about wine. Many wine terms sound incredibly pretentious to those who aren't into wine because there were no proper English words to describe wine, so they were borrowed from French. Talking about a wine's typicity, minerality or its nose sound jarring, because these concepts really don't exist in English. The same discussion in French would sound perfectly natural. And mouthfeel applies there as well.

What is the difference between texture and mouthfeel though?

kys

a steak has a texture, what kind of texture does a sauce have?

Depends on the sauce. Some sauces are very thin and nearly watery in texture, like Tabasco. Others might be thick and sticky like BBQ sauce. Some might contain chunks of ingredients in them like Tex-Mex red salsa or Indian chutneys. Others might have a creamy texture like Mornay.

And some sauces are astringent, while others coat the inside of your mouth and feel heavy, while yet others dry out your mouth.

>it's a completely unnecessary word when talking about western cuisine

But you need it to say something as simple as, "a sauce thickened with roux has a different mouthfeel than a sauce thickened with cornstarch".

I don't see how that's supposed to be pretentious; that's Western cuisine 101. I also don't see how you would say the same thing with a word like "texture", which clearly isn't what we're talking about.

>mouthffeel

I'm actually mad

In Chinese food, or in wine? In Chinese cuisine some dishes are not eaten for taste at all, but for the physical pleasure of eating them. Two good examples are sea cucumbers and chicken feet. There are no English words to describe these textures in a positive light, because Westerners generally don't like them. How would you describe a sea cucumber? Squishy? Rubbery? How would you describe the pleasure of gnawing off every little bit meat, skin and cartilage off a chicken foot? An English description sounds like an unpleasant struggle for little reward. This is where the concept of mouthfeel as a value in food, as much as taste becomes useful. It explains something that it difficult to put across in English.

When it comes to wine things get worse. The French have been making wine for thousands of years, and exporting it for nearly as long. They have a full vocabulary for talking about wine. English was late to the game for developing such a vocabularity, because most English speakers who drank wine were generally upper class people who also spoke French. The borrowed French terms like minerality, typicity and nose sound weird in English, as do other wine terms like roundness, body, structure and crispness. It seems weird to apply those terms to a liquid. But they're in many cases an attempt to describe how the wine feels in the mouth.

wa la

>"a sauce thickened with roux has a different mouthfeel than a sauce thickened with cornstarch".
You could use the word "consistency" there. But we don't have much in English to describe the texture of tofu skin, jellyfish salad, or the particular numbing action of Sichuan peppercorns. Because the idea of valuing such things is not in Western cuisine. That's where the idea of moughfeel applies. It's not just about the texture itself, but about placing a value on how the food feels when you eat it - something that may be as important as flavor in some cases.

The closest to that we come in Western cuisine are things we already have words for, like crunchy and creamy.

Yeah but mouthfeel doesn't describe anything about a dish without the modifying words like rubbery, crunchy, etc.

"Consistency" hardly says anything about the feeling of how different sauces coat the mouth and feel on the palate.

Just because in China they eat gross shit for the texture doesn't mean that "mouthfeel" only applies to those kinds of foods (and wine). As I said earlier, the main difference between a sauced thickened with roux or a sauce thickened with cornstarch.

Neither does "taste" or "smell", but those are both ways in which we experience food.

Also just using the term "texture" makes it sound like a picky 5 year old is talking; "I don't like it because it has an icky texture!". Whereas when texture is used in a positive way it's typically just to comment on how a dish contains a variety of textures, which is usually pleasant.

True. But it allows one to place value on the physical feel of eating the dish, as much as the flavor. In the West this can be controversial, as some folks find dishes with serious ly high levels of mouthfeel disgusting.

Fried chicken is a great example. Someone who is really into mouthfeel not only appreciates the crunchy shin against the tender meat, but takes nearly equal pleasure getting every little bit of meat, then the cartilage, and maybe even chewing off the softer bits of bone and some of the marrow. Those put off by serious mouthfeel experience will just dip boneless nuggets or tendedrs into honey mustard.

"fresh"

I hate when restaurants advertise their food as using "fresh ingredients" like it's some big selling point. I should damn well hope they're not using rotten ones.

The opposite of fresh in this context isn't rotten...

Suicide.

jus

now that 'za is a meme, i don't mind it. before, when some were actually referring to pizza as 'za, i wanted to climb through the internet and strangle them.

there are some food chemicals that give the illusion of texture. recently, pepsico added a chemical to diet pepsi so that it would seem to be syrupy. it's not actually syrupy, but when you drink it, it appears to be.

it's fucking disgusting.

"How would you describe the texture of this dish?"

"Crunchy."

"How would you describe the mouthfeel of this dish?"

"Delightfully crunchy."

Mouthfeel is more about how a food feels when it's just sitting in your mouth (think "viscous" or "waxy" rather than "hot", for example), not what the texture is like when you're chewing on it.

When it's just sitting there it feels like a wet blob of mush. How appetizing.

I guess OP was right

>i am unable to understand nuances and therefore must reduce everything to extremes in order to understand what is happening

hello autism

>when it's just sitting there it feels like a wet blob of mush

And in that case there's no reason to talk about mouthfeel because it isn't an applicable term to whatever food you're eating.

>How is the food?
>Like eating a candle this mouthfeel is so middle ages

That's the point. There's never a reason to talk about it. It's a nonsense term. If it needed to be used it would've been invented centuries ago.

If everything you eat feels like a wet blob of mush I'd suggest going somewhere other than a fast food restaurant, or at least get up the courage to eat there while it's still hot, instead of letting it get cold and soggy on the ride back to sitting in front of your computer, as comfortable as eating off a paper plate and shitposting on Veeky Forums might sound.

underrated

Christ

Depending on your diet it might be nonsense. We have all the words we need to describe the Western diet. Terms like: crispy, crunchy, creamy, tender, flaky, soft, smooth, thick, al dente, and the like.

But like I said before the idea of mouthfeel is placing a value on that in a way more common in Asia. We don't have good words to describe the particular pleasure of gnawing on a chicken foot. Many Westerners don't even see where the pleasure is in that. It's a foreign concept to them. Difficult to explain to someone who might prefer never being served meat with bones in it, anything squishy or gelatinous or soft shell shellfish.

So coining a term to describe it makes sense.

"Authentic"

Usually used by 3rd or 4th generation immigrants who have no idea what their culinary heritage actually tastes like, and just want to sound elitist against the globalized, western nation they grew up in.
youtube.com/watch?v=Fo59LlkTDe4

When someone describes the flavor of something as "flavorful". It's so utterly retarded.

I don't know. While I agree the word "authentic" has become nothing more meaningful than any other advertising buzzword I disagree with your assessment of 3rd or 4th generation immigrants. Their culinary heritage is EXACTLY what they're serving - a taste of their immigrant experience over three or four generations. If I want a taste of regional Italian cooking I go to a good Italian restaurant. But when I want a taste of the Italian American experience I go to an Italian American place. There may be some overlap between the two, but much of the food is totally different, and that's the point of why one might choose one over the other. Same is true for other immigrant groups that have operated restaurants here for generations.

>Culinary history isn't relevant to actually cooking and eating

idk fampai, ancient and medieval culinary history and can be pretty fascinating to get into; but i agree with your disdain for those "authentic" fetishists.

>oooomaammii

i'm on the fence about this one, man. i mean, there's definitely a 5th taste that's triggered by glutamates. what do we call it though? the japanese word umami is just dumb and pretentious sounding though (even though it just means "yummy") when compared to "sweet, salty, bitter, sour". what should we call it?

to be fair user, i think what people hate about these words is the fact that untalented chefs will name a dish with lots of "foody terms" and then the dish itself is disgusting or lackluster at best. sure a mushroom safron aioli reduction sounds like something interesting but more often than not it's used to hide behind lack of actual technique.

Generations of good cooks all over the world have worked out delicious dishes using the ingredients available to them, and figured out how to put those dishes together into great meals. Even if you don't give a fuck about "authenticity" if you cook you'd be a fool to ignore the combined wisdom of those who have gone before you.

a sauce can also be cloying on the palate, or starchy. there are plenty of terms, i think typically it's idiot amerifats with limited vocabularies who think that describing food with words is "pretentious"