Cooking Levels (Wheaton Scale)

[Ego]

A more useful question is how to become an accomplished home chef within the context of ERE.

Yes! My thoughts exactly. This is the kind of challenge that is appealing to the ERE sensibilities.

It is easy to make a delicious meal when you have a well stocked grocery store or farmers market, a willingness to spend and a recipe to follow. My creative juices get flowing when I have an abundance of overripe fruits. a giant bag full of a particular vegetable from the discard bin at the grocery store or an unusual ingredient from the 99-Cent Store that I must use to create produce a spectacular meal.

The ultimate challenge would be a full dumpster dive event where trash picked, random, crazy combinations of half-rotten ingredients must be used to create something delicious.

Now that we have a nice apartment Mrs. Ego and I were toying with the idea of hosting paid dinner parties using eatwith, Chefsfeed or airbnb experiences. Our goal would be to track the exact costs and see how little we could spend while meeting or exceeding the expectations of those with rather have high standards.

Ultimately, the quality of a meal is made better or worse by the quality of the company. Knowing how to turn mediocre ingredients into a sumptuous meal is only half the battle. Knowing how to nurture mediocre guests so that they are comfortable playing their part to make the dinner party memorable is at least equally important.

Unless the plan is to eat this incredible meal alone.

[Seppia]

@Laura
Yes cooking is multi dimensional but I would argue all skill are (at an advanced level).
So I’m guessing someone who is elite at one thing, but terrible at others, is probably still in the earlier stages of learning.
She/he is maybe in the copying phase, where it is not yet fully understood how ingredients interact with one another.

Buffets and places like Costco are valued.

I don’t fully understand if you’re saying this as a positive or a negative (sorry), but Costco has by far the best ingredients in terms of value for money than any other supermarket chain in America (and it’s not close).

[Seppia]

@Ego
Quality of ingredients is very strongly correlated with its price on a relative level but not at all on an absolute one.

So, on average, if you spend more than me in acquiring some chickpeas, your chickpeas will be better than mine.
The food ingredients market is very efficient.

Still, top quality chickpeas are cheaper than bargain basement salmon, and the former taste awesome while the latter taste like shit.

So I would say another skill is knowing how to cook a delicious meal with cheaper ingredients.
This is how I manage to spend half my peers on food while only shopping at the most expensive venues in town (been doing this for 20 years).

[Ego]

So I would say another skill is knowing how to cook a delicious meal with cheaper ingredients.

Agreed. Similarly it is possible to procure high quality ingredients inexpensively.

Yesterday I bought 4 3-pound bags of Bob's Red Mill almond flour at the swap meet for $1 a bag. They sell for $31.50 each on Amazon.



I walked down to the basement to take this photo of them and looked at the trash bins on the way back up to our apartment. On top of one of the bins I found a one-pound container of organic spinach. Brand new and unopened. Scratch that, Mrs. Ego said the container had been opened but it seems full to me.



So, what shall we create? How about a version of your farinata with the almond flour? Would that work?

[Dream of Freedom]

Four bags of almond flour and some spinach. Are you trying to get a kidney stone? Go easy on those oxalates.

[Frita]

@Seppia
Granted, healthy fresh food is available at Costco. What I have seen there are huge bags of processed and/or prepared foods. Observing people pushing out their big carts, they are full of this stuff too.

[Frita]

If one either does not know how to make a grilled cheese sandwich and cut it into pieces or finds the following to be a tasty timesaver, where does this person fall on the Wheaten cooking scale?

https://farmrich.com/recipe/grilled-cheese-sticks/

My spouse is watching college basketball on TV. The ad for these has been running every 15 minutes. Zola.com (a wedding planning site), an ad for insurance (A female senior citizen whose house has been destroyed twice is featured.), and Cadillac are also advertising. Hm, I don’t watch TV so perhaps this is normal?

[take2]

How do you value the ability to cook a variety of different cuisines? My mother and aunts in Portugal are all excellent cooks, but they exclusively cook Portuguese food. They replicate the same types of dishes without much creativity or innovation but they produce absolutely delicious food.

I consider myself a 3-4 on the scale because of the ability to produce delicious food with a collection of random ingredients (i.e whatever’s on sale) but I too focus mainly on Mediterranean type cuisine. I can’t really cook any sort of decent Asian or Indian food, and don’t really have interest in doing so. Is the ability to cross cultural cuisines easily and create unique fusions the key differentiator to unlocking the mastery?

[daylen]

Perhaps level five should be split into urban and rural (metropolitan and county styles). The former would focus on multi-culturalism and the latter on geographic/climatic cycles/constraints.

[Jean]

I'm not sure if your level description fits cooking, because unlike personal finance, cooking is skill heavy. I mean that you Can think at level 5, and Cook at most decent Dish most of the time, and Cook excellent dishes everiday day never going above level 3. I've been cooking nearly exclusively with trash for a year, producing decent variation of my favorite dishes at various exotic location, but there is no way that i'm as good as my grandma who never left french speaking Europe and Always relied on high quality ingredients.

[daylen]

@Jean Levels are meant to be qualitatively different and constructive (i.e. they build on each other). Quantitative differences in skill are abstracted away by design. So we may disagree on if my descriptions fit these criteria, yet skill should not factor in regardless.

Either way a more elaborate construction may be warranted with juicy details.

[Jean]

Maybe the assumption that all those scales are constructive is just wrong. A bit like how jacob noticed that walking had the same effect on him that what others meditated for years to reach. Reaching a very high level without having touched the previous ones.

[jennypenny]

I don't mean this to sound snarky (at all!), but the scale that's emerging is definitely being constructed by people who aren't trained in culinary arts. I don't mean that as a criticism ... it's more like if the people who created the ERE Wheaton scale were mostly from levels 3 & 4. There's a slight assumption that the top levels aren't necessary/useful and wouldn't fit within the confines of ERE.

Someone who's trained in culinary arts might work with expensive or hard to find ingredients as part of their training. That doesn't mean, however, that they can't then apply those skills to ERE-friendly ingredients once they've mastered the techniques. Good chefs can do wild things with basic ingredients, and produce delicious (and beautiful) dishes with whatever you give them to work with. It's the skillset and training/practice that makes that possible, not the particular ingredients or where they come from (except maybe being able to identify high quality ones within a category).

I'm not saying that people here can't cook or make great things out of dumpster finds. I'm only pointing out that advanced training can provide skills and insights that basic training cannot, even if the basic cook is quite competent. Is advanced training necessary? No, just like advanced skills and higher levels aren't necessary to ERE. It helps though.

There are lots of resources online and classes are offered at most community colleges.

(Obviously this has been a recent focus of mine ... I want to be able to maintain the quality of our meals regardless of the ingredients available to us if food production becomes unreliable in the future. Maybe I should have posted this in the deep adaptation thread. )

[Seppia]

So, what shall we create? How about a version of your farinata with the almond flour? Would that work?

You could try that (you have quite a bit of it available to experiment ) but I would think almon flour fits more with baking sweets.
I would mix with hazelnut flour and carrots for a carrot cake, or otherwise could work well in tartelettes with apples / pears

[daylen]

@Jean It is just a technique used to build the model that requires few assumptions, because levels are defined in terms of previous levels. Otherwise, each level is just a category that requires new definitions. That is like saying you understand what an ordinary differential equation is because I show you a few examples of system behavior that can be modeled by a particular one.

@jp Yeah, my intention was that ingredient or equipment quality should not factor in. Not sure about the status concerns. I just go off what seems to fit the assumption set I am using. In some sense, specialist are the least qualified to construct learning scales of their field unless they are actively teaching (early levels become unknown knowns). The 'logic' or 'template' of these scales only becomes more apparent by generalizing across many of them. Also, generalists would tend to value them more so they probably have more motivation to get it 'right'.

So, my intuition is that the construction should preferably be done by the collaboration of many agents at all levels of the scale in question.

[jennypenny]

In some sense, specialist are the least qualified to construct learning scales of their field unless they are actively teaching (early levels become unknown knowns). The 'logic' or 'template' of these scales only becomes more apparent by generalizing across many of them. Also, generalists would tend to value them more so they probably have more motivation to get it 'right'.

So, my intuition is that the construction should preferably be done by the collaboration of many agents at all levels of the scale in question.

Fair enough. The ERE scale was constructed that way. Maybe forumites aren't as evenly distributed throughout the cooking scale, or are too focused on cost/acquisition to pursue cooking beyond a level that's satisfactory and falls within other ERE bounds.

I agree that the top-most tiers are people who can't necessarily teach beyond a level or two below them (in any scale). Have you ever tried to learn to cook a dish from someone who can really cook? They rarely measure anything and tell you to judge by the color or texture of the food instead of time/temps, etc. It's infuriating when you're just starting out.

Sorry if I derailed a bit. I was only pointing out how limited the scale seemed because of the limited perspective and skills of forumites. My own interest in cooking is so that I can learn what to grow/acquire in addition to how to cook it. Improving my culinary skills has taught me what ingredients are valuable or necessary and which can be substituted more easily, as well as which are interchangeable. I've learned how to blend tastes (savory, sweet, etc) as well as structure meals so that the experience has a pleasing flow to it. << Those are the types of not-really-cooking skills that start to show up as you move up the Wheaton cooking scale, and none of them require spending any more $$ on ingredients.

[daylen]

Maybe forumites aren't as evenly distributed throughout the cooking scale..

It is fairly N-heavy around here.

I agree that the top-most tiers are people who can't necessarily teach beyond a level or two below them (in any scale). Have you ever tried to learn to cook a dish from someone who can really cook? They rarely measure anything and tell you to judge by the color or texture of the food instead of time/temps, etc.

I never really have measured or timed anything. I started cooking in early high school and made a TON of mistakes for a few years. It wasn't until recently, I think, that I have started the transition to level 4 on my scale. My speculation about level 5 is from analyzing the degrees of freedom. Once the science/strategy is understood and embodied the only remaining parts under your control are long-term planning and familiarity of who you are cooking for. In a country setting, ingredient scarcity and seasonality are predictable, and in a metropolitan setting, traditions and expectations can be studied.

Upon more reflection I very rarely used/use recipes, so my experience of level 2 is more like a series of experiments with fixed ingredient combinations that converged onto a set of self-developed recipes that probably already have a name.

[daylen]

Is the ability to cross cultural cuisines easily and create unique fusions the key differentiator to unlocking the mastery?

Culture crossing and creating unique fusions are lateral movements at level four (strategizing). Assuming that each culture has its own unique strategy.

[daylen]

So, theoretically, you could be at level 5 without cultural awareness by experimenting a bunch and developing many different processes/styles/strategies (that may or may not be associated to corresponding cultures) that serve as modalities dependent on something else (like metropolitan or country constraints).

[jennypenny]

@daylen -- Cultural awareness and and understanding of culinary traditions might be the cooking equivalent of Tyler's Portfolio Charts. You can study the ingredients/assets, and then look at how the different recipes/portfolios are put together. Some appeal more than others but all are arguably good. Cultural awareness would help a budding chef learn why different assets/ingredients work well together and which don't so they can level up on the scale.

Levels 6-8 (IMO) would probably include intuitive menu planning that incorporated one's preferred healthy diet, ease of acquisition (like cooking in season or growing the right food/herbs), presentation (ready all at once and in the correct amounts) and cooking skills that are second nature so that cooking can be enjoyed instead of stressing over instructions and prep. Top levels on Wheaton scales are always about flow states.

Wow, I'm really getting into the weeds. Sorry. It's a big week for meal prep (in the US) so I'm overly focused on it. I'll stop now.