Oligophagy: TV cookery
I do not think I have ever seen a recipe presented on a TV cookery programme which I could eat.
For savoury dishes, this is often because of vinegar; TV cooks go into raptures about balsamic vinegar. I just can't understand how so many people so love what I find an absolutely horrible taste. See Sour tastes.
The way the cooks, including all those I have ever seen do them on TV, ruin many sweet dishes, such as puddings and cakes, it is to add cream or yoghourt; but they can also ruin savoury dishes with these (see Cream, yoghourt, cheese).
Another thing TV chefs do is demonstrate
a perfectly acceptable main dish and then say
at the end
“then you just mix up a hollandaise sauce ...”
Ugh!
Fingers!
Something (apart from the oligophagy issue itself) that completely puts me off ever eating in a restaurant where any of these TV “chefs” do the cooking is the amount of fingering of the food. In my kitchen, I wash my hands carefully with antibacterial hand wash, always brushing my nails too, before starting cooking and after touching anything other than food, including especially if putting anything in the swing bin (the rubbish) — which means slightly touching the bin lid with a hand — (just for example). I also wash my hands after breaking eggs, before touching any food that will not be cooked, because raw eggs can contain salmonella. As is obvious (see eggs) I don't eat anything containing raw egg so I only ever break eggs when making cakes or possibly a sponge pudding. I did at one time make Yorkshire pudding or “toad in the hole” (essentially, Yorkshire pudding with sausages in, to be served simply with gravy and vegetables). And I am usually only cooking for myself, though I do sometimes have guests (and I think they find my cooking pretty good).
Fingers!
If cooking a meal with basic ingredients, I certainly take raw food and handle it, such as if dredging meat in seasoned flour; but once it is cooked it is only touched with utensils — a fork, spatula, or spoon (or any two of the above).
In total contrast, these egotistical TV cooks, and the junior cooks in the hotel and restaurant kitchens they show, fiddle about constantly with the cooked food, arranging already finished components on a plate for a customer with their fingers, and one never even sees a hand wash basin anywhere (I suppose they have by law to be in another room) or anybody using it before doing all this handling of the final result, after which the plate is put straight on the table in front of the customer.
Dinner is not still life
Apart from the business of fingers, if I have a piece of fish and some pasta or potato on a plate, I don't want the fish stuck in the middle of a huge empty space with the other stuff concocted with some (probably funny-tasting as well) sticky stuff into a slab which is then balanced precariously on top of the fish, as like as not topped off with something else on top of that which serves no purpose except to “look pretty”. I just want the meat or fish, the pasta or potato or rice, and any other vegetable placed side by side on the plate so that I can take a bit of any one of them as easily as possible. This thing of arranging stuff into a precarious pile that they do on TV not only seems to require fingers, which I abhor; it stops it being actual food and probably ensures it is cold by the time I get it.
All restaurants are too expensive
I wouldn't eat in one of those places if the food was free. I have no time at all for all that blue ribbon nonsense; and even if I were a millionaire I would not consider it worth my while to pay the prices for a meal that people pay for such places. My level even with all the money in the world would be a Pizza Hut pizza, or Macdonalds fries followed by their apple pie thing (I don't eat their hamburgers because you can't get one without all the nasty tasting gunk on it — not without a lot of difficulty and waiting, anyway, plus uncertainty as to whether it really is free of ketchup and mustard. If in the country I have eaten a good pub lunch at a place where one can see who is cooking. I trust culinarily competent women in kitchens (up to a point), but not these arrogant, pretentious men (not least because of those fingers).