i completely empathize with your fondness for hamburger helper; we all have nostalgia for the kind of food i loved as a kid. however, i think it’s unfair to say that michael’s kids are spoiled because they refuse to eat the pepperidge farm cookies. the problem is that although pepperidge farm is a “fancy” overpriced brand, those cookies are an abomination that only exist due to their “fancy” reputation and our desire for excess, with their delicious-sounding flavor combinations and huge chocolate chunks. instead of delivering on the idea of that cookie, they give us some hydrogenated mess that has undergone some kind of manufacturing process wholly unlike baking. we deserve better than that, regardless of price, and i wouldn’t fault anybody for throwing away bad cookies. the marketing of substandard food, the emphasis on quantity and commodity rather than flavor is the root of our growing obesity problem, especially among the poor. a meal at applebee’s costs as much as if not more than one at a restaurant that actually cooks their food from scratch, so it’s not a financial problem but rather a cultural problem.

What is the difference between an UNTRAINED linecook and a TRAINED Chef who went to culinary school:

MATH. School trained chefs know the math behind cooking, trim loss, edible portions, and purchasing amounts.

In professional baking, you don’t use recipes – you use “baker’s percentages.” What that means is you have recipes that aren’t in cups and ounces or pounds and gallons….you have things like “Flour, 200%,”, “Eggs, 30%.” What this is, is taking what a good baker should already know is a good ratio and tweaking it. Its the algorithm thing.

My deepest apologies, Mom–I swear I’ve reforemed! No more soft-baked cookies reminiscent of silly putty’s consistency, and only homemade mac ‘n cheese…or Michael Symon’s goat cheese version.

So if you’ve turned your kids into gourmets at an earlier age than my mom did me, congrats. I’m just a slow learner.

Now, granted, I wasn’t subsisting on a diet of fast food — McDonald’s was always a once a month thing, and I was a participant in the BookIt! program so I did get to eat the occasional Pizza Hut personal pan pizza — but by and large, a lot of what I was eating was stuff that you guys would have probably turned your noses up at. But the difference between you and me was that I knew how dirt poor my parents were when they were growing up and, because of that, I had an awareness of how fortunate I was that I had what we were able to have. So I learned not to complain whenever my parents served up something, because I knew that my thoroughly blue collar environs were so much a step up from the poverty that marked my parents’ childhood (childrenhood?). And Pepperidge Farm? Counted as one of those fancy brands we couldn’t even afford until I was 14 and my mom got a big promotion at work, thus increasing our household income. (It was also the year I started working part-time, but I count that income as relatively negligible.) To have your kids complaining about Pepperidge Farm cookies should be a sign that you are overindulging your children, not a sign that they are being raised with “good taste”. What they should be complaining about are the super-cheap generic packages of duplex cremes, like the ones I remember eating as a small child. Why? Because that’s all we could afford. My parents had to find some way of paying for day care and their parents’ living expenses, so we lived on a tight food budget.

And, you know, to this day the only homemade cookies I have ever eaten have been the ones I’ve made myself, using ingredients I myself have sprung for. I didn’t start doing that until I was 23, out of college, and finally with the amount of spare time and disposable income to where those expenses could fit into my budget. I have since learned how to cook, from scratch, a great many things, and to truly love and relish the opportunity to do so. I love making homemade mashed potatoes and stuffed pork chops and my own gravy and biscuits made not from a mix but from scratch. Yet I look upon a box of Hamburger Helper with a huge amount of fondness. I still think Pepperidge Farm is rich people’s food. I think throwing out any food that isn’t spoiled is a waste of money and would much rather see that food being given to someone who is going to sleep on an empty stomach tonight. And I hope that I never, ever, ever change.

i completely empathize with your fondness for hamburger helper; we all have nostalgia for the kind of food i loved as a kid. however, i think it’s unfair to say that michael’s kids are spoiled because they refuse to eat the pepperidge farm cookies. the problem is that although pepperidge farm is a “fancy” overpriced brand, those cookies are an abomination that only exist due to their “fancy” reputation and our desire for excess, with their delicious-sounding flavor combinations and huge chocolate chunks. instead of delivering on the idea of that cookie, they give us some hydrogenated mess that has undergone some kind of manufacturing process wholly unlike baking. we deserve better than that, regardless of price, and i wouldn’t fault anybody for throwing away bad cookies. the marketing of substandard food, the emphasis on quantity and commodity rather than flavor is the root of our growing obesity problem, especially among the poor. a meal at applebee’s costs as much as if not more than one at a restaurant that actually cooks their food from scratch, so it’s not a financial problem but rather a cultural problem.

i completely empathize with your fondness for hamburger helper; we all have nostalgia for the kind of food i loved as a kid. however, i think it’s unfair to say that michael’s kids are spoiled because they refuse to eat the pepperidge farm cookies. the problem is that although pepperidge farm is a “fancy” overpriced brand, those cookies are an abomination that only exist due to their “fancy” reputation and our desire for excess, with their delicious-sounding flavor combinations and huge chocolate chunks. instead of delivering on the idea of that cookie, they give us some hydrogenated mess that has undergone some kind of manufacturing process wholly unlike baking. we deserve better than that, regardless of price, and i wouldn’t fault anybody for throwing away bad cookies. the marketing of substandard food, the emphasis on quantity and commodity rather than flavor is the root of our growing obesity problem, especially among the poor. a meal at applebee’s costs as much as if not more than one at a restaurant that actually cooks their food from scratch, so it’s not a financial problem but rather a cultural problem.

Culinary School.

Yup, that’s what you learn in school – you learn the microbiology of cooking and what happens when you change up the ingredients and the heating/cooling methods at the molecular level.

The subtitle to the book is “And Other Antidotes to Computer Anxiety,” and Chapter 7 is a breakdown of the algorithm for making his Aunt Martl’s Sachertorte. I enjoyed it, even though I’ve been more of a network analyst than a programmer. Not much about food, though.

What you’ve done is describe a basic algorithm for creating a website that would be more worthwhile to spend time with than the ersatz cooking shows on Food TV. People probably thought Jimmy Wales was nuts when he proposed Wikipedia, but look what they’re saying now. Do you belong to eGullet? You might want to propose this idea on there. Somebody with programming skills might just run with it.

I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing for a long time. I mean, you cannot cook and watch others cook for as long as I have without suspecting that all basic preparations might be represented as ratios of ingredients that are prepped, combined and (sometimes) heated in a specific series of steps.
Something similar could be said for parameters of taste, flavor and shape. Discarding the reality of individual variation for the moment, don’t all pizza margherita look, taste and smell more alike than not?

I also think it would be kind of cool to go through a bunch of books of classical French cooking and pull out every method of preparation and every ingredient, make a database of it all (not that I have any idea about how to do this, mind you) subject it to some statistical tests and see what kind of patterns emerge.

Not sure what practical use there’d be for any of it. Perhaps nothing more than a neat looking new way to describe classical cooking. But who knows?

Okay, I have a headache now -always happens when I allow myself to think beyond my ability.

but i want to be clear, this is not an elitist decision. it’s a taste decision (combined with the fact that they’ve got 97 ingredients–they recall those 1970s space food sticks). There are great mass produced cookies out there, from the very same food giant. but these aren’t among them.

At least half of that mile long list of ingredients are chemicals designed to keep the cookie from hardening with age. It’s like they reversed engineered Viagra and dropped the result in these cookies. If you are going to buy store cookies, stick with the classics – Milanos, Oreos, etc.