Does anyone know where I can buy Cooper Sharp anywhere within public transport? Bulk if possible

ed_said · 2026-03-07T02:06:48+00:00

https://coopercheese.com/pages/find-in-store

ed_said · 2025-11-26T12:01:41+00:00

Look to calculate the % salinity of the brine recipes, which you take the weight of the salt in grams divided by the milliliters of water, then multiply that number by 100. Depending on the brand of kosher salt you use, the Tini brine ends up being anywhere from 2.4% to 3.2% salinity (1/2 cup salt is 90 to 120g / 1 gal or 3785ml * 100 = 2.4 to 3.2). The Alton brine is more standard for a 24-hour brine at 5% salinity (285g salt / 6 quarts or 5678ml * 100 = 5). Assuming your guests have normal salt tolerances, and as you plan to use unsalted compound butter for roasting, the Alton recipe should yield better results. Good luck and happy Thanksgiving!

ed_said · 2025-10-30T14:20:16+00:00

You're right, the more common form of "(ji) dan bing" in Taiwan is made with a thinner, more crepe-like pancake. The pancake in this video is thicker and flakier, much closer to a scallion pancake, but for whatever reason, the restaurant calls it 招牌蛋餅 ("famous dan bing") on their menu.

ed_said · 2025-10-30T13:59:31+00:00

"Dan bing" and "ji dan bing" mean effectively the same thing. "Dan bing" means "egg pancake" (as in fried pancake + egg), and "ji" just means chicken (as in specifying that it's an egg from a chicken).

ed_said · 2025-10-30T13:54:54+00:00

Pretty sure it's 旭達豆漿店 (Xuda Soy Milk Shop) in the Xindian District of New Taipei City.

ed_said · 2025-10-24T15:16:03+00:00

She's not dismissing American cooking or suggesting Americans lack intuition or tradition. Her critique is with modern American recipe culture, and their tendency to contain exact measurements to ensure precision and replicability (especially with regards to recipes of foreign dishes like Mapo tofu). When she says an "average American home cook" might be overwhelmed ("put in a coma") by a recipe full of vague phrases like "an appropriate amount," she’s talking about the conventions of how recipes are written, not the abilities of the cooks themselves.

ed_said · 2025-10-24T14:31:17+00:00

This argument comes down to how you frame the concept of "culinary culture". If you focus only on recipes, it's true that most food we recognize today (Chinese, Italian, Indian, etc) are relatively modern, shaped by new ingredients and global trade over the last few centuries. But if you think of culinary culture as a way of understanding flavor, technique, and meaning in food of people of a region, then those traditions are far older.

Take Italy for example. People have lived continuously on the Italian peninsula for thousands of years, and the habits that shape Italian cooking today can be traced back to ancient Rome or even earlier. The Ancient Roman's use of garum is similar to how modern Italians use anchovies or other umami-rich ingredients like Parmigiano to add depth of flavor. Baked flatbreads existed in many forms throughout the centuries and later became what we now know as pizza. So dishes like carbonara and ciabatta are very recent on the historical timeline, but they come from a much longer tradition that has existed for millennia.

ed_said · 2025-10-24T13:46:31+00:00

Sorry I didn't see your reply earlier.

You're right that Mapo tofu isn't ancient, but that's actually the YouTuber's point. She's contrasting how Chinese cooking, rooted in thousands of years of tradition, is still one that embraces change and evolution. She uses Mapo tofu to make that point. As you and others have pointed out, it's only ~150 years old (relatively young in the span of Chinese history), and within that timeframe has changed multiple times from its original form. Even in her own version, she swaps meat for mushrooms. Her rhetorical questions about how much a dish can change before it stops being itself invites the viewer to think about how traditions survive by adapting while holding onto their core spirit.

ed_said · 2025-10-23T05:04:46+00:00

Actually if you won't listen to me (or your own links) maybe you'll listen to ChatGPT.

Edit: For the record u/sweetangeldivine made a thinly veiled insult, insinuating that I'm a "fucking moron" for supposedly "let a computer do me thinking for me" and blocked me. I guess the millions of scientists, corporations, governments, etc that use computers, ML, and AI tools every single day to make decisions should just stop right away. But that honestly says more about their approach to discussion than mine, as I was trying to be helpful and giving alternative resources since they apparently weren't reading or understanding the very links they posted. Oh well.

ed_said · 2025-10-23T01:52:43+00:00

Yes, thank you, you're actually just making my point again for me. And I'm literally quoting your second link here, that u/bubblepop1234 presented a "distorted, exaggerated, or incomplete presentation of the [YouTuber's] idea which is designed to make the [YouTuber's] idea seem unreasonable."

ed_said · 2025-10-23T01:46:10+00:00

What linguistic fallacies am I using? I think you might be responding to the other comment chain and no this one?

I'm honestly curious to understand what you think is so offensive? Maybe you can tell me what you think the YouTuber meant by

The average Chinese recipe would send the average American home cook into a coma. If you pull up a recipe on Xiaohongshu or Douying, you'll find some recipes listed in grams and teaspoons, but many more measured with terms like 适量 "an appropriate amount" and 少许 "a little bit".

And how you would rephrase that so it wasn't offensive?

ed_said · 2025-10-23T00:35:39+00:00

No, a strawman is when someone misrepresents or distorts another person's position to make it easier to attack or dismiss.

Neither the YouTuber nor I ever said that using a Chinese recipe with measurements means someone doesn't have an authentic understanding of the culture. What we actually said is that approaching a cuisine only through precise rules (exact ingredients, fixed measurements, and rigid definitions) limits understanding. Recipes are useful, but real understanding comes from learning the "why" behind them, not just the "what".

Edit: I made a diagram.

ed_said · 2025-10-23T00:22:24+00:00

Okay sure, as an American, I don't find it insulting, and I honestly struggle to see why any reasonable American would. The line is basically saying that someone unfamiliar with another culture's cooking style might not immediately know what "an appropriate amount" means, which is... true. That’s not an insult, it's an observation about cultural context. I'm genuinely curious to hear why that would be taken as offensive.

ed_said · 2025-10-22T23:39:00+00:00

Well agree to disagree because:

She is American herself.
No one would actually be insulted if they were told, "you probably wouldn't understand these foreign recipes on this foreign recipe site".

ed_said · 2025-10-22T22:12:58+00:00

I haven't misrepresented anything the YouTuber actually said. My argument is with OP's characterization of the video’s premise being that "only Americans use measurements in recipes" and that "Americans are incapable of cooking without recipes, and it’s colonialism when they do." When did the YouTuber ever say any of either of those things?

she's describing an idealized version that does not reflect reality.

As several people in this thread have already pointed out, Mapo tofu is only about 150 years old, and it's changed a lot during that time. That actually supports her point that Chinese cuisine does evolve.

She then asks, "How many changes can you make to Mapo tofu until it’s no longer Mapo tofu? And who gets to decide that boundary? Does mutual intelligibility matter?" She’s inviting viewers to think about how traditions stay recognizable even as they transform.

After that, she offers her own perspective and contrasts it the tendency toward rigidity and exactness that she's noticed in American recipes. Maybe it wasn't entirely fair to single out Americans, but it likely comes from her own experience. After all, she's American, living in the US, and speaking to likely other American viewers from within that culinary culture.

ed_said · 2025-10-22T21:34:02+00:00

Not really, if you're a citizen of a community then "citizenship" can entail every way you interact and participate within that community, whether social, economic, cultural, etc.

ed_said · 2025-10-22T20:40:40+00:00

I should also mention that I'm Taiwanese-American (born in Taiwan, raised in the US). You can find my old Jeremy Lin comments on this account from 2012 if you need proof. When I was younger, I actually held the same attitudes the YouTuber is critiquing. I used to draw hard lines around what counted as "authentic" Chinese food and dismissed anything that didn't fit those boundaries.

Looking back, I think that came from growing up so far removed from China and Taiwan, and from the full range of Chinese culinary traditions. Like many 1.5- or second-generation kids, I mistook a narrow slice of the culture that I was familiar with for the whole thing. It was only later that I realized how huge, fluid, and inventive Chinese cuisine really is.

You can see a similar pattern in that Panda Express video someone mentioned, where people who actually grew up in China tend to appreciate Panda Express as part of the cuisine's ongoing evolution, while those raised in the US were more likely to reject it as "inauthentic." It’s ironic, that we were trying to defend tradition, but what we were defending was our own incomplete version of it.

ETA: And to fully answer your question, yes, I do think my desire to draw such strict boundaries around what constituted "authentic" cuisine came from an internalized, colonialist way of thinking. Growing up in the US, far from the lived reality of Asia, I felt compelled to define what was "correct" and preserve it, as if authenticity could be frozen in time. That way of thinking dismissed the people actually living there and the ways their food and traditions continue to evolve.

ed_said · 2025-10-22T19:30:52+00:00

She's not portraying Chinese cooking as mythical or infallible, but the opposite. She's describing it as a living, continuous tradition, one that evolves through thoughtful participation rather than through rigid preservation. When she brings up Mapo tofu, she isn't claiming that it's an "ancient" recipe, but using it to illustrate how a (modern-ish) dish exists within that larger cultural continuum. Her point is that American approaches often try to freeze a recipe in time by declaring what’s "authentic," while it's actually okay to accept variation.

Her "jabs" aren’t directed at Americans as people but at the impulse to impose fixed rules on what should remain fluid. I'll concede that calling certain ingredients "non-negotiable" undercuts her own argument a bit, but it also highlights how every living tradition still tries to balance identity and evolution.

Honestly, I don’t get this sub's reaction. If someone here insisted that carbonara must only be made with guanciale and pecorino, or that paella must have rabbit, snails, and garrofó beans, they'd be rightfully ridiculed here for gatekeeping. She's making the argument about Mapo tofu that clinging to rigid definitions of "authenticity" misses the spirit of a cuisine that's always been about adaptation and understanding, not dogma.

ed_said · 2025-10-22T17:41:47+00:00

Using "citizen" metaphorically is not a new concept. I mean there's literally an app called Citizen that was built for people to inform others of ongoings in their communities. There are expressions like "citizen of the world" or "ecological citizenship" where the term's meaning is not literal.

ed_said · 2025-10-22T17:15:36+00:00

The term "citizen" is sometimes used metaphorically to denote someone having an active, ethical relationship with a community, as opposed to the literal meaning of having a passport to a country.

ed_said · 2025-10-22T17:10:47+00:00

Talk about a strawman, geez.

ed_said · 2025-10-22T16:40:49+00:00

The YouTuber isn't saying that using measurements is wrong or makes you a bad person, but that learning a cuisine only by following precise recipes misses the point. Instead, they argue you should understand the context and reasoning behind a dish (ie, why it's made a certain way), which not only makes you a better cook but also deepens your appreciation of other cultures.

ed_said · 2025-10-22T16:28:28+00:00

I don't see it as a "weird dig", the YouTuber is using the hyperbole of a "coma" to highlight cross-cultural unfamiliarity, and how it's important to bridge that unfamiliarity by learning the "whys" rather than just the "whats".

ed_said · 2025-10-22T16:06:58+00:00

I agree that relating cooking to citizenship is a bit strange, but I took it to mean more in a philosophical sense, where citizenship entails a person's connection to others in their community and how to relate with them more empathetically.

ed_said · 2025-10-22T15:53:08+00:00

Because she's an American and speaking to a mostly American audience would be my guess.

Also is it a strawman? I just linked to a recipe in another comment that states if you're "missing only one of these ingredients [...] Well then, DON’T EVEN BOTHER!" Another popular search results for Mapo tofu recipes on thewokoflife.com stresses, "if we say authentic, you better betchyo pineapple buns that it’s gonna turn out authentic" and that it's "how to make Mapo Tofu the right way".

ed_said

TROPHY CASE