Poll of the Day > What's the most COMPLICATED FOOD you know how to COOK???

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What would you say is the most complicated and hardest food you can make? for example, the most complicated dishes people can are desert dishes or even cooking a turkey...while a medium level experience are people can make mashed potatoes or making spaghetti...

while only the simpletons, which is most people, can only pre-heat food like making hot dogs and heating up a tv dinner...

so what's the most complicated thing you can cook?

https://i.imgur.com/wLDGGVZ.jpg
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I can cook anything with instructions on the packet mostly so basics?
We all know Sunny is the best cook here.

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you apparently dont know a lot about cooking duckbear because cooking a turkey is easy as shit

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Unless you get into molecular gastronomy (which I consider more of a party trick than "cooking") and really elaborate presentations that take several minutes of playing with tweezers to plate (which is stupid), nothing in cooking is really that complicated. There are many things that have multiple parts to them, which can be a challenge to time, and some components can have pretty small margins of error (like making caramel or souffles), but it's rare to come across any recipe that's genuinely too complicated to understand without a culinary background (unless it uses a bunch of needless jargon to pretend it's harder than it is).

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Most dishes arent hard with good instructions. I use the same site (and also an app) to get recipes. And it great because both have comments so people can talk about it. Which means you can get help, or maybe learn a way to make something easier, or better...
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Not really complicated, just really delicate... but mille fuille

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LinkPizza posted...

Most dishes arent hard with good instructions. I use the same site (and also an app) to get recipes.

Oh I can follow these too.

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The most complicated

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One of my exes went to culinary school and taught me all she knows, so I like to pretend I am a great chef.

My grandfather used to make cream puffs. Now THAT was complicated. I remember it took a lot of time and he didn't make them very often. First you have to make a pte choux, which puffs up into a nice fluffy hollow ball, then you use a pastry bag to inject them with pastry cream.

I've made a lot of turkeys. They're not really difficult, just very time consuming. It takes at least 2 days not including defrosting.

Risotto is a pain in the butt to make, since it requires adding a little bit of broth at a time and stirring constantly for an hour. Not really complicated, just annoyingly slow.

I've created several recipes of my own, including a Brussels sprouts and pasta dish that my Brussels sprouts-hating roommate loved, a "loaded" baked potato soup, and a slightly healthier chocolate chip cookie that uses whole grains and dried cranberries. Inventing your own recipes is probably the most complicated thing anyone can do in the kitchen.

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Baking maybe. Or quality gravy/cheese sauce from a roux

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I can cook a lot of things as long as I have a recipe.

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captpackrat posted...

My grandfather used to make cream puffs. Now THAT was complicated. I remember it took a lot of time and he didn't make them very often. First you have to make a pte choux, which puffs up into a nice fluffy hollow ball, then you use a pastry bag to inject them with pastry cream.

Cream puffs aren't that bad. Choux paste can be a little fiddly to get the consistency right (you need it soft enough to pipe, but solid enough to hold its shape, which boils down to how much egg is added at the end), and the consistency means piping it can take a while, but there's nothing really complicated about it. Filling them is also really easy if you've got a small enough tip to just stab them (if not, you may have to cut them in half, which is a real pain).

Turning them into a croquembouche does get a lot more complicated, especially if you start getting fancy in decorating them. The classic spun sugar nest is easy enough to do, but a lot of people will get into some pretty elaborate sugar work. That said, croquembouches are dumb. It's a buttload of work to make cream puffs harder to eat while providing no flavour benefits whatsoever (they're still just cream puffs).

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I can probably cook something simple.
I'm just too lazy to do it most of the time.
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my steak marinade, my carrot cake, and my cheesecake are probably the biggest PITA things i make.

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Lets see.
Brewing
Wine, whiskey, beer
Meats
Beef Wellington, smoked food items,
Veggies
That aint food its what food eats

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Making chicken potpie from scratch is needlessly complicated, and I know how to do it. Actually, a lot of pie or pie-like recipes, from scratch, can be fairly complicated and time consuming, all for fleeting moments of flavor and joy. Between that and the dishes involved, it's a wonder I don't do them often.

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Why make chicken pot pie when you can just make chicken paprikash instead...or even a crock pot pie?

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LuciferSage posted...

Why make chicken pot pie when you can just make chicken paprikash instead...or even a crock pot pie?

You're not wrong, but it misses the point of what I was saying.

Come to think of it, I don't think I've actually listed the most complicated thing I know how to make, if in part due to the fact I'm unsure what the most complicated dish might be.

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Most cooking isn't particularly complicated, although proficiency will greatly vary. Two cooks can have access to the same ingredients and get asked to make the same dish with wildly varying results.


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Entity13 posted...

Making chicken potpie from scratch is needlessly complicated, and I know how to do it. Actually, a lot of pie or pie-like recipes, from scratch, can be fairly complicated and time consuming, all for fleeting moments of flavor and joy. Between that and the dishes involved, it's a wonder I don't do them often.

Maybe the pastry takes some effort, if you're making something fancy/ laminated from scratch. But a standard pie shell and the filling don't take much finesse at all. And it comes together extremely quickly.

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Clench281 posted...

Maybe the pastry takes some effort, if you're making something fancy/ laminated from scratch. But a standard pie shell and the filling don't take much finesse at all. And it comes together extremely quickly.

"Fancy" is about right. Like I said, "needlessly complicated." lol

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Pot pie filling is more than just cream of mushroom, chicken, and vegetables?

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I dont get more complicated than boiling water really. I would like to know how to cook but i dont have the drive to put effort into things like that so it probably wont ever happen.

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I don't think cooking is that hard unless you want to be fancy (baking seems to be trickier than other cooking on average, though), but I'm not very dexterous with my hands, so I tend to stick to eating food stuff that doesn't require handling a knife, which means I don't cook much of anything anyway. Mostly eat like... sandwiches and cans of stuff, etc...

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I don't cook beyond heating stuff up in the microwave.

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ScritchOwl posted...

Beef Wellington,

Oh yeah, beef wellington's probably the most complicated thing I've done. Especially where I bought the tenderloin whole and butchered it myself while never having done any butchery on that scale before. It would have been even more so if I made the puff pastry from scratch (which I hadn't done at the time, but I've done since for other dishes). That had a lot of different components to it and was generally a very fiddly meal.

Clench281 posted...

Maybe the pastry takes some effort, if you're making something fancy/ laminated from scratch. But a standard pie shell and the filling don't take much finesse at all. And it comes together extremely quickly.

Yeah, I don't think of chicken pot pie as being remotely complicated, unless you're breaking down a whole chicken and making your own puff pastry to use for the crust (the former of which mostly just makes sense in a commercial setting and is probably something you'll be doing for other dishes anyway, and the latter of which is largely reserved for overly fancy tryhards).

Entity13 posted...

if in part due to the fact I'm unsure what the most complicated dish might be.

I'm kind of in the same boat. I just don't think of dishes in terms of complexity that often, since the time it takes to prepare them and the amount of equipment needed (i.e. I can't do multiple oven temperatures at the same time with my single oven) are far more relevant to my ability to cook them.

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I mainly do packaged stuff, but we have some old family recipes that are fun to try and make.

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Most of the time my cooking just involves cook meat/vegitables with salt and pepper. I don't like complicated food. Sometimes though, I will make soups or stews, so those tend to be a bit more complicated. For example, making chicken noodle soup the proper way (simmer a whole chicken in water and vegetables for a few hours to make your own stock).

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adjl posted...

I'm kind of in the same boat. I just don't think of dishes in terms of complexity that often, since the time it takes to prepare them and the amount of equipment needed (i.e. I can't do multiple oven temperatures at the same time with my single oven) are far more relevant to my ability to cook them.

Hear, hear.

Limitations on oven space, stove space, counter space... Tools are damn good otherwise. Then it's a matter of having necessary ingredients and time to do everything. Not to mention mental energy since I spend 2+ hours a day cooking multiple dishes at work and however many hours on food prep.

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