Natural Recipes

bodell1989

With the increasing popularity of natural foods, whole foods, etc, have you considered developing some recipes to fit that category?

Though I'm not die-hard about it, I have started trying to be more consciencous about what eat. While there are many of your recipes that I'm excited to try that might not fit this description, I would love to see more recipes that didn't require specialized chemicals, but were more based on meat, veggies, spices, etc...recipes that my grandparents/great-grandparents could have found the supplies to prepare.

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brian_martin2001

I'm not sure how many recipes of theirs that you've actually gone through, but there are quite a few recipes (the majority I'd say) that don't necessarily need the "specialized chemicals." As far as recipes your grandparents/great-grandparents could have found, there are lots of websites out there that already have recipes like this.

I watched an interview years ago with a chef, and he stated that if we only ate food that our grandparents would have eaten, food available to use: average every day, and what you have available in a restaurant, would be totally different. Assuming that the grandparents' concept of what food was take back even further, we'd be still eating like that did in the dark ages or even earlier.

If you travel back 100 years, the sushi wouldn't have made it out of Asia, pizza would still be exclusive to Italy (with the exception of some immigrants' households), hoagies/subs wouldn't exist yet, corned beef would still be beef that was unpalatable salty strictly for preservation, rare beef would be considered mostly a death wish, pork and chicken would be cooked to unpleasantly dry for safety's sake, I could seriously go on for days.

The vilification of food additives and "specialized chemicals" is largely due to blatant ignorance and an almost child-like refusal to try to understand what these compounds are, why they're used, and why they make a better finished product.

While there's nothing wrong with what you're looking for, on this website there are already several recipes like that, and there's a myriad of other websites that already offer this, so why should they change what they are doing?

A_Saunders_30503

Brent, while I sympathize with your position my personal view is more like Brian's. To answer your question we have to define "natural". The USDA definition might not mean what you think it means (http://www.redarrowusa.com/_uploads/resources/USDA_Natural_Definition_Statement.pdf)

That said, almost every receipe here, when it calls for an unnatural ingredeant, does so because it works better/faster/easier than a natural ingredient. A good example is cured meats- chef steps recommends curing salt/Prague powder which is salt, nitrites and red dye (so it isn't confused with regular salt). If you use it to make bacon them the bacon isn't "natural". However, you can juice some celery (high in nitrates) and reduce it to a powder in a manner that qualifies as natural (Fermentation?) and use that to cure the bacon. And that is how whole foods and trader joes can sell "natural" and "uncured" bacon even though they use the same chemical, just a more expensive version of it.

My point is, you can convert any receipe on chef steps to a "natural" version, I would ask myself why I am doing it first.

HammeredChef_DEFINITELY_does_NOT_work_at_22134

Interestingly enough, most of the "specialized chemicals" are in fact natural, for instance TG or "Meat Glue" is a natural binding enzyme derived from fermented bacteria (the healthy kind) Xanthin Gum is produced by the fermentation of glucose, sucrose, or lactose. And the list goes on....

brian_martin2001

Rob:

Can you imagine the amount of people who would start freaking out if they started marketing ingredients and foods by their proper (or not so proper) IUPAC nomenclature?

"I'm going to the store to pick up some sodium chloride, some sodium bicarbonate, some distilled dihydrogen monoxide..."

Can you imagine just the length of the name for something people take for granted like milk? haha!