Rate my food

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Shrimp tacos

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Chinese-fried quinoa

>>8937691

It looks nice, sure. But why would you put that moist egg over the top of the crispy potatoes? That's going to make the potatoes soggy and lose their crisp. Put the egg to the side so you don't ruin the nice crispy texture.

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Sous vide ribeye w/ homemade herb butter
Roasted Brussels sprouts w/ balsamic reduction

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Salmon tataki

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Tilapia

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Hasselback potatoes

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Just a simple burger (I like to quickly broil them after assembling to crisp up the bread a bit)

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Egyptian kushari & baharat-spiced shrimp

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Wonton soup w/ chicken feet

In case you're wondering, I'm Ukrainian and while none of this food is really inspired by my upbringing, I was raised on chicken feet and have always loved them.

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Salad rolls

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Salmon roll

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Noodle salad

Looks good lad. Would eat it all.

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Beer mac n cheese

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Some sort of Vietnamese-inspired soup

>>8937702
I think the yolk from a perfectly poached egg adds so much to pretty much any dish. The cheese was cooked to a crisp with the soft potatoes underneath, so the egg didn't soggy up any of it, just brought it all together nicely.

>>8937691
allbrettygud/10

Beautiful dishes OP. You should post here more.

>>8937734
What's the yellow stuff in your salmon roll?

I would eat all this stuff. Looks good mang

>>8937725
Your food all looks delicious. Just curious, did you pose that chickenfoot to look like a hand or is that just the way it was naturally?

>>8937710
this whole dish looks so good

>>8937694
Toast the tortillas

All excellent, except for the first

All this food/photography looks highly professional. Its either for a high end restaurant or some food magazine or site. I'm having a hard time believing some random 4channer made these things, but the photos are quite nice. The cooking, plating, and photography is just too immaculate to be believable, this is a professional chef cooking for a studio photographer to capture. No way in hell this was for mother's day. Where did these pictures actually come from?

>>8937691
>cooking for my wife
Bet you cook for her son too cuck

>>8937801
This is a good thread.
Go away and take your juvenile 'memes' with you.
Good job, OP.

Plating, presentation, and photography are all phenomenal. Visual balance of the foods look great as well. I'm sure it will smell and taste just as good as it looks too. Are you a chef OP?

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>>8937806
This site was built on memes kiddo. Go back to Plebbit

>>8937691
Looks good but the egg can stand to be cooked for slightly longer. The whites looked like cum in the thumbnail.

>>8937794
apart from the fish hasn't been descaled.

>>8937717
>simple burger
kek.

You spent hours carefully stacking every ingredient. Just to get a photo.

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OP here. Wow, I didn't expect such a good response from a lot of you! Makes me feel much better about my presentation, I've been working hard for many years to get to this point but I still feel there's still quite a difference between me and professional.
>>8937783
Thanks, I've posted here in the past on occasion. I tend to stay for a few months, then forget about it and disappear for a couple of years. I didn't get very good reception the last time I was posting my food pictures, about 3-4 years ago. Most of the responses were that it looked amateurish or their dog had puked up something more appetizing. Looking back at them now, I think the camera makes a big difference. This is some of my old work.

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>>8937783
Oh, and that's tomago.

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>>8937787
I wanted it visible so I pulled it above the surface, but not necessarily in that position.

You have great presentation.
Also the egg in the OP looks like it has the consistency of jizz mixed with water.

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>>8937800
Moved to a new house 2 years ago and now have my dream kitchen, so a great backdrop with good lighting helps a ton. We have an average-priced camera but simply tweaking the white balance can make every photo start to look more professional, so thank you for the compliment on my photography skills!

>>8937829

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>>8937829
Nope, no training or anything else. I've always loved food so when I left for college and started cooking for myself I quickly gained a lot of interest in it. I would quickly come to hate my passion for food if I was forced to cook for people as my job. In more recent years we've been able to afford better and more unique ingredients, so we've been able to expand our horizons quite a bit.

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>>8937862
I definitely agree with this. I think that my eggs may have not come fully up to room temperature, they could have used another two minutes. A minute less and the white wouldn't have held together.

if you had an apparent weakness, it's probably texture

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>>8937899
Of course! Wouldn't it suck if I couldn't go back to these photos years later to salivate over the food and get inspiration for new ideas or reminders of old favorites?

>>8938057
That pasta is freaking me the fuck out

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>>8938072
I agree. I still have trouble with cohesiveness with the entire dish. A lot of the time I just want to cook 3 or 4 specific dishes, then I just place all them on a plate and some of them don't make sense. So often I'll be a couple of bites in and suddenly wonder why I didn't add anything that has a crunch to it. And sauce. I'm really trying to remember to make a sauce to join everything together.

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mfw all of this
im getting so hungry now. ive been doing a alternate day fasting diet for about a week now and this just pushed me over the top.

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I forgot to mention, these are the chocolate crepes with strawberry sauce that went with the Mothers Day brunch.

>>8938080
>this combination of ingredients
Do you want to eat any of it or just make pictures, what? Go full hog and don't use actual food for better looking pics, like the pros do all the time

>>8938075
Do you get so obsessed with cooking and photographing that you forget to eat?

Looks good op

would eat

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>>8938112
That one is a traditional Easter Sunday breakfast when you eat all the ingredients in your basket after you fasted the past couple days.

>>8937704
A nicely done rib-eye and well-prepared brussels are my two favorite foods period. That looks really fantastic, what level of doneness did you bring the steaks to?

>>8937691
Damn I was gonna come in and meme at you being a normie with a wife who throws parties and actually enjoys things but if this shit is all really you then well done man

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>>8938113
I only cook and photograph because I want to eat, so it's never been a problem.


My wife is the baker in the family (also does all the breakfast food)

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>>8938130
Always medium-rare, closer to the rare side. I make myself sad inside if it ends up getting to medium.

>>8937691
OP, if you actually cooked all this then I have nothing but respect. It looks fucking great. I wish I had you as a friend. You clearly really enjoy cooking.

>>8938383
>medium-rare, closer to the rare side.

steak that isn't quite medium-rare, is rare.

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>>8938516
Actually, I don't even know what I was talking about, I was high. I'm not sure why I wrote that, I always eat my steak rare.
Made the pasta dough a bit too thicc.

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>>8938509
You know what I appreciate more than good cooking? People that can appreciate good cooking.

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>the first good thread on /ck/ in years


For me, it's the McChicken.
The best Fast food Sandwich

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What religion are you? Better not be one of those rich kikes

>>8937702
you sound like an idiot

>>8937704
.....mmm I love eating un melted butter as a sauce......

>>8937892
exactly. fuck off with the scales/head still on. you aren't in hells kitchen.

>>8937713
meh, they seem like too much of a...... hassle

>>8938604
Back to /pol/ with you.

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>>8938604
Ukrainian Catholic, but I don't practice it other than the fun traditions that I grew up with.

The wife wanted to do a fairy-themed meal.

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>>8938618
Do you eat your steak at room temperature? That fucker is hot off the cast iron and I rushed to take a photo before the herb butter all melted.

>>8938630
that was a fucking shit joke

>>8937691

the egg white is raw....

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>>8938626
It was our first time trying it as we had been wanting to for quite some time. It looked unsettling to me, but the meat inside was perfectly cooked with a nice, mild flavour from all the herbs, so I would try it again. Definitely looks good when photographed. I didn't know that about the scales though... should it have been descaled if all you're doing is opening it like a book and eating the flesh inside?

>>8937744
Excellent. Care to share your recipe?

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>>8938668
Do you even know what raw egg white looks like? It was only 2 minutes away from being absolutely perfect.

>>8938680

you asked people to rate it faggot, eat some more raw eggs if it hurts your feelings.

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>>8938677
I honestly have no idea. I usually look for 3 or 4 recipes that look good to me, use the ingredients that I like, remove the ones I don't, base it off of the cooking time that the most recipes follow, and then wing it from there. So while there are some recipes that I make often and could put a recipe together no problem, others are like that mac n cheese and I winged it all and have no idea what I did.

I also make pickled goods.

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>>8938687
Do you know how to rate something, faggot? That wasn't a rating.

>>8938699

raw/cooked

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>>8938717
Is this more to your liking?

>>8937725

Looks really good, then i see the feet that looks like some kid's hand...

Rest of the photo's look delicious.

>>8937708
Make sure you use sashimi grade or smoked salmon. Salmon parasites can and will infect humans.

>>8937691
>no recipes

All this shit looks gr8, though.

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>>8937691
fucking raw egg white

what's wrong with you, why would you serve that to your anyone, much less your mother?

>>8938588
Thank you for salvaging this train wreck of a thread.

>>8938798
Can people incapable of cooking just leave /ck/ or at least stay in their fast food threads?

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>>8938768
I haven't been able to find sashimi-grade and am not even sure if it's a real thing or just a marketing ploy. I believe that all salmon is flash frozen to remove parasites, but I definitely don't go and buy it from Walmart. Pick it up at T&T Market (a large asian food store) where all of their "fresh" fish are out on display.

We always get so giddy, wanting to buy the fish heads for soup stock or the gigantic scallops. I then thickly coat the salmon in salt and leave it for awhile before rinsing it off really well. Right before slicing, I get my cast iron to as hot as it can go, then sear the exterior of the fish for about 30 seconds before serving. Barely cooks the flesh below the surface.

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>>8938798
It was for my wife. My mother got flowers and a card.

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>>8938805
the presence of raw eggs in a meal you're serving indicates you -don't- know how to cook.

>>8938816
that's even worse.

>>8938805
There's a lot of jealous line cooks that are assblasted because an amateur has cooked and plated dishes they could never approach, so they have to try to shit up the thread.

>>8938816
>tfw you will never have a father who can cook this well and a mother who loves baking
Your future children are so lucky. Make sure to raise them on a variety of food so they don't end up as manchildren.

>>8938806
I wasn't telling you what to do with your life. Only giving you my 2 cents.

I feel I'm moderate with a bit on the riskier side? Sunny side eggs, raw/seared tuna, rare beef, rare bison, raw oysters, etc

When I usually eat Salmon raw it's either at mid-range restaurants. On a few occasions I have bought sashimi grade salmon from a Japanese market and ate it raw. I feel tuna is a much safer option if you want raw fish since even if there are parasites in it they aren't evolved to be compatible with human bodies.

Most of OPs photos look like he wanted to photograph it rather than eat it. It all looks bland with no seasoning.

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>>8938980

>Here you'll find a shitposter completely out of his depth

Trolling is good when you can do it from a position of authority. In this thread you lack competence and mask your insecurities by throwing uninformed insults.

OP, keep it going.

>>8939528
Why ask people to rate your dishes and ask if we would eat it if you're going to be so defensive about it?

>>8939593
Not op.

>>8939593
OP's dishes are objectively great. Go fuck yourself.

>>8937704
Looks bretty good, but also looks like you took so long to shoot those pictures that the steak isn't even hot enough to melt whipped butter.

Wow, this is all really impressive, OP. I hope that I can make something that looks half as good as all this someday. I like it when you guys share original content.

>>8937691
I know this makes me the faggot, but those aren't hash browns, hashbrowns are grated fried potatoes. Those are home fries or fried potatos

Two questions.

1.) Is there anywhere in particular where you get your recipes from? Cookbooks, etc. You're obviously well-versed in a variety of cuisines, so I was wondering whether these dishes are intuition, inspiration, or a mix of the two.
I mean, you mention it in >>8938694 , but I'm still curious.

2.) What pickled ingredients get the most use outside of the obvious carrots and cucumbers?

Great thread, thanks for sharing your delicious-looking foodstuffs.

>>8937691
>rate how it looks and if you would eat it.
4/10 and no I wouldn't

>>8938798
>>8938827
Heating your Kid Cuisine in a microwave doesn't make you an authority on cooking, anon.

>>8937691
Your plates are fucking GAY.

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>>8938827
>the presence of raw eggs in a meal you're serving indicates you -don't- know how to cook.

>>8939593
He specifically addressed the OP from the third person you imbecile

>>8938768
>>8938895

like any fish you buy commercially will have been frozen to kill parasites, 'sushi grade' is bullshit mang.

>>8938680

>only two minutes away from being absolutely perfect

kek

undercooking an egg by two minutes = serving a raw egg

>>8937691
Hash browns look good. Egg white is obviously undercooked and I don't know how you didn't see that when you dumped it on top of them. 2/5

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>>8938887
We have an 18 month old son and he definitely gets a variety of food, not a picky eater at all. We joke that he's tried a larger variety of food and cuisines already than most people have tried in their entire lives: heart, liver, chicken feet, gizzard, studenatz (jellied pigs feet - attached photo), tripe, raw fish, blood sausage, pickled herring, etc

But he'll probably grow up hating all of our food and just beg for pizza pops and fruit roll up like all his friends are eating in school.

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>>8938895
I like to reply with a meaningful answer, even if it's tl;dr
Sounds like I'm pretty much the same way. I'm willing to try prettymuch anything as long as it's prepared properly and rare/raw food doesn't bother me at all. A blue rare steak is too rare for me, but I'd still prefer it over overdone meat..

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>>8940059
Practice makes perfect! I've been cooking for 15 years now and I feel that it's only in the past 2 or 3 years that I feel much more satisfied with my my meals and plating. But even then, I'm still my biggest critic and I almost always find one or two things to tweak in the recipe for the next time to make it even better. Slowly learning from every meal you cook.

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>>8940099
Fair enough, you are correct.

My wife bought me a precision cooker last year and I've been having a lot of fun doing sous vide everything.

good stuff op. do you normally improvise, follow recipes, or a bit of both?

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>>8940670
I always used to be interested in my moms cookbooks, looking through them when I was young and reading all the notes she left as to how the rest of the family enjoyed or disliked the meal. So when I first left home and started cooking I was definitely using cookbooks quite a bit, since I knew barely nothing. I would also take my favorite recipes from my mom and tweak them to add/remove things that I always wanted to.

Years later when I started cooking up more unique meals rather than traditional home-cooked meals, I found how easy to was to find recipes online and completely moved to that media. I really liked the more in-depth recipes, where the author talked about the little tips and hints to make things better, the skills you learn through experience.Same as the food blogs that approached cooking as a science and how/why food ends up the way it does and more efficient means to achieving it than the traditional methods (ie. making risotto without having to stand there and stir it constantly for an hour).I learned a lot from those, the actual concept behind cooking and why food turns out the way it does, not just blindly following a recipe and not truly understanding why you're taking each step.
So all of that sort of built up my experience for 10+ years until, without even knowing it, I had the knowledge to tweak recipes and come up with my own and just wing the meal more often than following an actual recipe and coming up with something good.There's quite a few meals that I love cooking often and those ones I don't even have to think about it anymore, the recipe is ingrained in my mind.Then when I try something new or I'm not completely confident with, like I said before, I find 3 or 4 similar recipes, follow the core directions and ingredients with them, and then just wing it from there.I rarely cook a new meal and decide that it's perfect, I almost always want to tweak a few things and it takes making it another two times until I'm very happy with it

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>>8941288
I'm still going to defend that egg, it is so close to being absolutely perfect and in its current state is still better than the best egg that most people have ever cooked before. If the white has set and is intact, to me that is a success. I love it when the yolk and white almost have the same consistently and they mix together into a delicious sauce that binds the entire dish together. I'd definitely recommend trying out your eggs in that way.

>>8941517

it has not set and is not intact, so i guess it's not a success

>>8938827
So where are all of your pics of food, anon? Or are you just content to bitch and moan about how there's no quality threads?

>>8941517
>I love it when the yolk and white almost have the same consistently

So you mean uncooked?

When the yolk is runny, it's because it's uncooked. If you cook the yolk, it solidifies (aside from non-traditional cooking techniques).

You're talking about a snotty, uncooked egg.

For fuck's sake, look at the bottom edge, it's translucent. Big heap of snot.

>in its current state is still better than the best egg that most people have ever cooked before.

An overcooked fried egg, or dry ass scramble would absolutely be better than the egg in the OP post.

MMM MMM SNOT

OP is pretending to be a good cook without actually being a good cook. He is more concerned with attempting to present the dishes as "looking good" than them actually "being good." It's almost as if he's more interested in being a food photographer than a cook, though he's pretty bad at that as well. There are plenty of flaws in most of these dishes, and some of them look downright awful. His cooking wouldn't be acceptable at a fucking applebees, much less a proper professional restaurant. Instead of trying to cook 1000 different dishes (many of which I suspect you never did before, or maybe once or twice), start with learning maybe a dozen or two basics and learn to master those first. Once you have learned those well, then move onto other things. Showing effort is good, just don't get ahead of yourself.

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>>8941578
Hmmmm... I have never thought of it in that way before, perhaps you're right. I ALWAYS eat my yolk runny, if it's started to harden then I consider it overcooked, but perhaps you're right that it isn't cooked until it has hardened. I even leave my yolk slightly pasty and bright yellow when I boil my eggs.

What do other people think regarding this? Is an egg raw until the yolk has actually hardened or is it it like a steak, it can be rare yet it has still been cooked. I side with the latter. To me, it's uncooked if the white is still fully translucent, slimy and can't be held together on its own, the yolk has no bearing at all.

>>8941517
>it is so close to being absolutely perfect and in its current state is still better than the best egg that most people have ever cooked before.

I hope something terrible happens to you and your son grows up fatherless, you naive cunt

>>8941629
Someone is passionate about their eggs

>>8941621
Someone is jelly

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>>8941621
Fair argument. I don't claim to be a professional cook or photographer and don't want it to appear as though I am one. Cooking is merely one of my passions and I enjoy taking pictures of the food for future reference and for my own enjoyment, both of which I believe I do better than the average person and that's good enough for me.

I spent 10 years cooking boring ass looking food and attempting to plate it and failing (see the attached photos near the top of this page). It may have not looked pleasant, but in that time I definitely worked to get good at a lot of techniques, mainly proper cooking times and learning to NOT OVERCOOK THE FOOD.

So 5 years ago my food tasted great. It's only been in the past 5 years that I've been focusing on plating and presentation while still improving my actual cooking skills. I don't think my plating skills are close to those of a professionally trained chef, I realize that there are a lot of flaws, and I'm fine with that. I'm always learning and gaining more experience and the food only needs to look good to my family or dinner guests.

>>8941621
I know anons have a tendency to tunnel vision on one thing and the eggs being in the OP doesn't help that. And although I would agree that OP has questionable taste in eggs, the thread is still higher quality than most of what gets posted to /ck/.

Yes, amateur photographs of food are better content than McChicken and "spruce up my ramen" posts, sorry to disappoint.

>>8937702
>>8938618
pls go

>>8939752
this guy with his rationality here

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>>8937691
>>8937694
>>8937699
>>8937704

Anon, is it really hard to teach yourself how to take nice photos? I've tried to follow some guides before on taking photos, but I feel lost all the time. I have nice DSLR, well nice to me, and was wondering if I could start taking decent quality photos of my food or you knew where I could start

>>8941732
Not OP, but a lot of the time it's all about lighting: unaltered room lighting can make a shot look flat. If you add even just one additional light source (bounce board, flashlight, lighter, etc.), it will instantly boost the quality of your photo.

>>8941732
There are plenty of guides on youtube about photography basics.

What I did when I wanted to improve my photography skills (for work purposes) was to buy a photography textbook from a shop that sold used college textbooks.

Another "trick" that you can do regardless if you have zero experience or you're a fucking master is simply to take a huge number of photos. Take photos with different lighting, different angles, different settings on your camera. Pick the ones that come out the best.

People see great photos on websites, books, or magazines and think the photographer must have been incredibly skilled but aren't aware that those photos were hand-picked out of hundreds or thousands of others. Back in the days of film photography this was very costly, but with digital? Just snap away. Take a ton of photos and delete the bad ones. This also helps you learn since you can see what effect different settings & lighting has on your photo.

>>8941755

>take loads of photos

literally the number one tip

used to be amazed at how all the girls i knew took classy fucking photographs all the time and then i realised they are literally taking photographs all the fucking time

>>8941764
Also, I forgot to mention:

Some DSLRs have settings that will do this for you automatically. You can program the camera to take a series of photos each time you press the shutter, each with different exposure parameters. Check your camera's user manual to see. This is called "Autobracketing" or AEB (automatic exposure bracketing). Depending on your camera this can be configured for flash settings, exposure time, focus, aperture, or perhaps some combination of the above.

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>>8941732
I've struggled with it a lot but looking at my past photos I know a few things that have increased the quality of them by a lot.

The most important thing is lighting. I used to have very strong lighting in my kitchen but it wasn't nearly good enough to photograph food and everything turned out orange. There's a lot of natural light in our new kitchen and that helps immensely, but I also turn on all the available lights. The pictures still turn out orangish but a quick adjustment to the white balance and it will improve the photo by 4 times.

My brother is a professional photographer and would be able to give you better advice than me, for me it's all just trial and error. I like to have an angle that is close to being parallel to the table rather than taken from above, with the second plate looking blurry in the background.

We just have a simple little Canon EOS M and that's all we need, I'm sure your camera is better. With good lighting, even an iphone is almost good enough, but being able to save the photo in RAW format makes adjusting the white balance so much easier.

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>>8941755
Yes, this is also good advice. The most rushed part of cooking is the last 5 minutes, trying to plate it all and then frantically snapping 10 photos in a single minute, adjusting the angle of the camera, rotating the dinner plate, etc. At least one of those photos will turn out good enough.

>>8941810
How did you get that potato (is what I'm assuming) on the steak to look like that? I don't know why but that weird shape makes it really appealing to me.

>>8941854

It's herbed butter, probably dispensed out of a piping bag (like used for decorating cakes), or possibly a whipped cream dispenser.

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>>8941865

Like this.

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>>8941865
Yep, this guy is correct. It's herb butter made in a whipped cream dispenser so it's nice ad light and fluffy.

>>8941878
>Cheesy mashed potatoes stuffed mushroom
I'm in heaven

>>8941621
But cooking skills are largely transferable. Why drill the same 10 dishes over and over when you can hold your interest and learn more by actually being creative (an important skill in itself)?

>>8938647
I like this one a lot. Simple, easy and looks delicious.

Asparagus stuffed in cream cheese and wrapped in bacon with EVO drizzled cherry tomatoes sprinkled with sesame seeds on top of more cream cheese with a balsamic vinaigrette dipping sauce?

I'd pay money for that.

>>8941621
You're a faggot

>>8942231

Depends entirely on your perspective. For a home cook, or for a high-level pro chef, I agree. Creativity is great.

For most people in the restaurant industry (i.e. pro chefs and line cooks) consistency is key. You don't want a line cook who is constantly fucking with dishes and putting his personal spin on them. You want a robot who does it exactly the way that Chef taught him to make that dish, and you want it done the exact same way every time. Customers who came to the restaurant and liked a particular dish expect it to be exactly the same whenever they come back. They don't want it to be made with whomever's personal creative touches.

And while I'm not a pro cook by any means, I found that cooking the same dish many times helps me to improve my technique. The effect of subtle changes like amounts of seasoning, freshness/quality of ingredients, and changes in cooking time become much more apparent when you're making the same dish over and over again. If every dish is new and different then the different nature of the dish can cover up more subtle things.

>>8941621
t. Butthurt line cook assblasted because an amateur btfo of the shit he slops in the trough of his customers.

>>8937691
nothing on that plate is a hash brown.

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>>8942315
Almost 100% correct. The only difference is that the tomatoes were with a goat cheese while the asparagus and bacon were with regular cream cheese. I had my doubts when we started putting it together (it was my wife's idea) but we made some tweaks and the final product was better than I had expected.

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>>8942355
This has already been covered, I was completely wrong to call it that.

How do you all prep your ingredients to get ready to cook? Do you chop it all up as you go, the kitchen slowly getting more messy and cluttered?

I hate clutter so I use the mise en place method. Clean and cut all of my ingredients in their separate dish all ready to go, placed in the area where I'm going to need to use them and in the order that they'll be added to the dish. I make sure my kitchen counters are all clean and cleared before I even turn on the stove and then I can keep the kitchen clean the entire time. I also find I never second-guess which ingredient to add next as it's all in order for me, I just have to focus on the cooking times.

>>8938816
is that pickled ginger?

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>>8942561
Yes, tried my hand at making congee for the first time. Turned out pretty good.

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>>8940670
> What pickled ingredients get the most use outside of the obvious carrots and cucumbers?

I realized I missed this. I make/have made pickles, pickled carrots, garlic, onions, beets, asparagus, drunken beans, cauliflower and radish. I think that about sums it up.

I LOVE my pickles, I think I make some of the best pickles, so those definitely get used up the most often. Other than that, it's definitely pickled garlic. I also make damned good pickled garlic and would bring it out every time that we have guests if it wasn't for the fact that there aren't that many jars available. We like to make smaller jars of pickled goods as well and give them away as gifts, as a thank you to people, when we visit someone elses house, etc.

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>>8942530
>mise en place
This is the only way to do it. Everything else is sloppy and disorganized.

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>>8942753
Did you cook that in the picture? Looks fantastic.

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>>8942767
I did not. I goggled it, like this picture. But I've gotten a lot of inspiration and great ideas from your pictures though. So thanks!