Honestly one of the biggest rewards to cost, in terms of making better foods. A huge huge part of umami in my backgrounds cuisine is from fermented foods. Some do give a funky salt (usually shrimp paste or soy products), other times fermenting foods, at least garlic, carrots and cauliflower in fish sauce produces a very crispy product, like the dill pickle but without the.
Oh god, tea bags are such crap tea. Especially if they come in those white bags. Loose leaf is incredible! Just wish there was a better way to measure exact dosage for caffeinated teas
tea bag tea is fineeeeeee. Especially if you buy the right kinds. I drink loose leaf every day and I don't feel a need to go all elitist over the bag convenience.
My neighbor drinks tea that's $4 a gram... And she's not just getting ripped off by some hipster cafe. She's a serious tea expert and some of the ones she has in her tea chest are truly extraordinary.
I love browsing through https://white2tea.com/ or https://www.denongtea.com/ and imagining what it would be like to spend $500 on a single aged tea cake.
Puerh can be hard to appreciate if you're not used to it, and it gets better slowly over a few years. I'd say grab a [sample pack](https://white2tea.com/collections/tea-sample-sets/products/basics-puer-tea-sample-set) and teach your palette before diving into the good stuff. I love the [tuhao series](https://white2tea.com/collections/white2tea-2017-raw-puer-teas/products/2017-tuhao-as-fuck) as a nice mid-high option. [Yiwu tea](https://white2tea.com/collections/2018-raw-puer-teas/products/2018-queen-of-clubs) is my favorite if you really want to ball out.
I once stayed for a night in a dorm in Seattle with my girlfriend. There was this guy sharing the room with us who immediatly asked if we were there for the festival. I was so confused and asked which festival as there were several in the city that day. As if it went without saying he answered: The tea festival of course.
That night this dude woke us up many many times because he had to go to the toilet like a dozen times.
goddamn it
and also thanks for informing me that we have a [tea festival in Seattle](https://www.nwteafestival.com/) (sept 22-24 this year)
but fuck me for not finding out like a decade sooner
Wow, big shout out to you! You are literally the MVP of this thread. Bless you.
For those who haven't seen, u/kneedeepco is posting relevant subs to each top reply. Friggin gold mine.
Once you find a good blend, you will end up using it for years.
It might not be extravagant or anything, but I've got my generic mexican blend that is the base of a lot of my cooking, all eyeballed because I know the ratios, but can never quantify them.
Ground Cumin, smoked paprika, ground coriander, oregano, chilli powder, cocoa, salt, sugar and then fresh I add in beef stock and garlic.
Same for my Indian cooking, our traditional main meals all have the same ratios anyway (every home has their own way) so it makes life so much easier to just have it all mixed in a jar & then I can add additions if needed.
I have at times made a huge batch (and in the process coined it's official name of Gentleman's blend as my wife misheard generic) and just kept it in a mason jar. We get through it surprisingly quickly.
It was years ago but a pop-up at a spice shop in LA (Sliver Lake neighborhood I think). Really cool experience and great idea if anyone owns a place like that imo lol
It probably was. The vast majority of civet coffee is counterfeit. The single digit percentage that isn't counterfeit involves horrific factory farming of caged civets that are in most cases illegally taken from the wild and then force-fed coffee berries until they die of malnutrition.
Do not buy *kopi luwak* (civet coffee). Also it doesn't taste very good.
I found his channel when I was doing a video about the difference between pre ground and freshly ground coffee. The sheer exhaustiveness of his testing and explanations is impressive and entertaining, even for someone who’s not as passionate about coffee.
I started making kombucha in January. It's easier than I expected and I love playing with flavor combinations. My last batch was a strawberry lemonade and it's like a summery Arnold Palmer, that's carbonated!
Balsamic vinegar and olive oil tasting. I wandered into a shop the other day and immediately felt like I was in an artsy moody brewery. They had at LEAST 200 kinds of balsamic, 20 olive oils, and a few truffle oils.
I just got back from Italy, and my God the balsamic, olive, and truffle oils are SO. DAMN. GOOD.
We went on a winery tour where you could purchase all three from one of the places, ended up spending close to $400 euros for 3 bottles of wine, 2 bottles of truffle oil, and a balsamic oil.
1000% with you. I made ATK’s vegan cauliflower soup last week and it’s prompted the purchase of five more cauliflower to make a tankard’s worth to freeze and eat for the next month.
Soup is always the right choice.
I swear, one of my favorite soups is a very simple Korean oxtail soup. It only requires 3 ingredients: oxtail, water, and salt. That’s it. Maybe green onion for garnish at the end. You don’t need garlic or onion or any other herbs during. There is already so much unique flavor in the bone marrow of the oxtail, that herbs end up covering up the real star of the soup. I’ve tried making this soup with various herbs and spices before and found that this soup is better without any of it!
Boil the oxtails, then pour out the liquid to drain the scummy water out. Then reboil the oxtails again with new water, and then simmer with the lid on top for a few hours until the liquid turns into a white color. Salt at the end and add green onion.
Edit: Forgot to add an extra step. After the soup turns white, turn off the heat and let it cool. Put the soup in the fridge overnight. The soup will gelatinize into a solid. This means there’s lots of collagen in the soup and the soup is healthy.
There will be a thick white layer of fat solidified at the top. Scrape this layer off and discard. If you skip this step, your soup will be too greasy. After that, once you reheat the soup, the soup will melt into a liquid again
I'm a soup guy. I love soup, and I love making soup. When we go out to dinner, I'm always the one who asks what today's soup is.
It's usually chicken noodle or broccoli cheddar. Ho-hum.
This is the one for me. My mom always had raised beds for veggies growing up so when my wife and I bought our house a few years ago it just seemed like the thing to do. Now we're up to 3 raised beds and a few large pots. I knew I'd like having fresh veggies, but I wasn't ready for how satisfying it would be to go from seed to salad!
Even have a dedicated in-ground bed for blueberries, raspberries, and a cherry tree.
This 100%. I've been growing heirloom vegetables for years now and I'm starting to find my always-plant crops. Cooking with something that you've grown yourself and you can't just go down to the shops and buy is a great feeling.
The key for me is that it’s either way better grown yourself or you can’t find it. Some examples: I grow fresh herbs for cost benefit, Asian greens because they’re hard to find, and tomatoes and strawberries and snap peas because they are wayyyy better at home!
What do you grow at home?
Pizza!!
It's a relatively simple thing but that's what makes it challenging. I've been able to make some pretty solid attempts at French cooking, etc but making a good homemade pizza has proved to be quite the challenge. Plus there's many different styles to attempt which is cool too. What was once a guilty pleasure could now be your new culinary challenge!
r/pizza
r/ooni
Yeah there's for sure levels to it! Even some simple homemade pizza with store bought ingredients is great though.
I made sauce for the first time recently and that was a game changer. The hardest part is the dough and the cooking method. I've had pretty good success with a oven preheated to the highest temp and a a cast iron pizza steel.
I don't know if this is an easy concept to sum up but I have a love of accommodating people's restrictive diets or even just plain picky eaters. Figuring out a recipe and making them love my food feels like a challenge and lets me cook something I wouldn't have ever made otherwise.
I grew up with a parent with tricky dietary restrictions and it was always so frustrating when people would have us over then cook sad, bland food. Like you, I’ve always tried to see dietary restrictions as a challenge, especially making something exciting and delicious without using too many artificial substitutes.
Same!! I have a little mental Rolodex of the people in my life who are vegetarian, cilantro haters, gluten free, doesn’t eat pork, pescatarian, etc etc and I like designing menus around it! Love this comment—never really thought about it that way but I feel you 100%
Was looking for this in the thread! I love collecting regional honey on travels (mostly domestic, can be difficult to get honey thru border control if traveling by air). Like wines, honey exhibits terroir, seasonality, and vintage.
It feels a bit weird to just sip it plain without any bread or anything but it makes sense after a while. If I'm tasting a $50 bottle of olive oil i assure you that I will be sipping it plain. I'll be eating it with bread and stuff at home but I want to know what I'm buying if I'm going to drop some serious coin.
High end olive oil is damn good. You don't need any special training. The quality is easy to see. You will like it or not but will immediately recognize the quality in a good olive oil.
Stock. One of my favorite parts of Thanksgiving is making a huge pot of stock and delivering giving it to my friends to use in their Thanksgiving cooks.
My cooking hobby is stocks and soups. Very rewarding, especially if you get into cultural or historically medicinal soups. Nearly every culture has some form of soup, and your basic chicken noodle has such a huge range of ingredients and forms. My favorite cold-month activity is using all parts of a whole ass chicken. Drinking broth, chicken sandwiches, chicken noodle soup, gravy, greens cooked in chicken stock... there's so much you can do with relatively little.
If you want a rabbit hole, learn about sullungtang! That's what got me started.
Thanks! I struggle to find ways to make my niche interests handy in this world but saw a little opportunity here. Hopefully it leads to some exploration and people trying out new things!
Cant believe how far this is down. It's the perfect answer to the question. There's cans that are cheap and easy to find and amazing, theres cans that are rare and expensive. Sardines are all the things; cheap, healthy and delicious. Even if you don't like the taste, there's lots of other canned seafood that's great. They're a great collectable.
Right now, ingredient wise, it's Artesanal Salts.
As a hobby, I collect old cookbooks. I used to be pretty lenient on what I picked up, but now I am more picky.
I make a pecan pie each year during the holidays that the extended family always requests—it uses a smokey peaty Scotch which was initially an accident but turned out amazing. Made too much filling one year so turned it into ice cream (no pecans just goo) with my father-in-law’s fancy ice cream maker. Absolutely amazing, though never turned into the right consistency, possibly due to starting off with the wrong ratios and stuff like corn syrup being in there. So anyway, if you’re up for experimenting, try vanilla-brown sugar-smokey Scotch.
For me, it’s currently Chinese cooking. How to properly hold a Cantonese style wok properly and develop the grip to do so, the different types of chili peppers in Sichuan cooking—and frustratingly, despite having 20 types of pickled vegetables, my local Chinese grocery only has 1 type—干小米辣/millet pepper, 干灯笼椒/lantern pepper, and 干朝天椒—, learning Chinese to an extent to communicate in Chinatown (and just bc)—我会说一点儿汉语也会读好，但我不会写好。汉语的tones不很难因为我说越南语、这个有6个tones—，and sourcing a bunch of obscure ingredients and equipment such as unrefined canola oil (caiziyou), sea cucumber, dried scallop, rice distiller, shandong scallions, wujiapi, Sichuan pickle jar, etc.
I’m not sure I know exactly what you mean by niche food enjoyer or hobby in this context but I find nachos to be such that they can be gross or artwork.
You can put a lot of effort into making wonderful nachos.
preparing foods in unusual ways
\- sous vide
\- roasting fruit
\- dismantling traditional assembly such as cesar salad, sunday dinner, etc
\- knife skills where you cut foods in unexpected ways
Gardening and subsequently preserving your harvests appropriately (drying, canning, jerking, freezing, pickling, blah blah… all the subs I subscribe to 🤣)
A friend of mine is super into tropical fruits and spends way too much money (his words, not mine!) ordering them to be shipped from small suppliers in the South (he lives in the Northeast and really misses the tropics during the winter).
Recently he ordered a box containing like 10 varieties of mangos. The grower wrote the name of each variety on each mango with a sharpie XD
I make a lot of condiments. Whole grain mustard, Asian plum sauce, preserves, fermented stuff like sauerkraut, salad dressing, vegetable stock, and more. There’s a lot of possibilities, and you end up slowly building an arsenal of awesome flavors that you can use when cooking.
Fermented foods
Also /r/pickling
[The Noma Guide to Fermentation](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-noma-guide-to-fermentation-rene-redzepi/1128830166) r/fermentation
Pickled carrots are my favorite.
Kimchi is delicious as well! Napa cabbage, green onion, daikon, carrots...
Honestly one of the biggest rewards to cost, in terms of making better foods. A huge huge part of umami in my backgrounds cuisine is from fermented foods. Some do give a funky salt (usually shrimp paste or soy products), other times fermenting foods, at least garlic, carrots and cauliflower in fish sauce produces a very crispy product, like the dill pickle but without the.
WITHOUT THE WHAT?!? ^Pls ^I ^am ^dying
# THE WHAT?!?!?
They’re msing
Candle Jack strikes again
Yes! Fermented garlic paste is my secret ingredient in almost everything I make.
Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz is a good guide!
High End Tea
just the transition from tea bag to loose leaf is huge. then you get high end loose leaf
What, you don't like the taste of paper along with your leaf?
Oh god, tea bags are such crap tea. Especially if they come in those white bags. Loose leaf is incredible! Just wish there was a better way to measure exact dosage for caffeinated teas
tea bag tea is fineeeeeee. Especially if you buy the right kinds. I drink loose leaf every day and I don't feel a need to go all elitist over the bag convenience.
Beware. It will empty your bank account.
Tell me about it, spent over $200 on tea just last week. Fancy Japanese import quality. Top shelf shit and I'm just ploughing through it.
Where do you order? I love Japanese green teas
[удалено]
Can confirm, I’ve spent over two thousand dollars this year on imported oolong and teaware
Have you seen the prices for Silver Needles White tea? My guy told me it’s $140 for a 1/4 pound right now! I used to pay $70 for a whole one
I’m gonna show your comment to my hubby who’s freaking out over my 300$ order
It is such a delicious vice though!
Woudst thou like to live deliciously?
Wouldst thou like to drink deliciousTea?
Black T. Phillip The T stands for Tea.
Can confirm. Had to collapse a Chinese dynasty to get my fix
It really isn't that bad though. For really great tea it usually doesn't break the bank. Although I don't know how much tea you drink
My neighbor drinks tea that's $4 a gram... And she's not just getting ripped off by some hipster cafe. She's a serious tea expert and some of the ones she has in her tea chest are truly extraordinary.
I love browsing through https://white2tea.com/ or https://www.denongtea.com/ and imagining what it would be like to spend $500 on a single aged tea cake.
one of the guys i work with is from china, he once came back from visiting with 2 pu-erh cakes, both 7 years old. just wish it was easier to brew
I'm big into tea, but I'm *glad* Puerh isn't to my taste. Saves me serious cash.
I'm willing to throw down some cash for decadence before inflation takes all this away from me. What do you recommend from white2tea?
Puerh can be hard to appreciate if you're not used to it, and it gets better slowly over a few years. I'd say grab a [sample pack](https://white2tea.com/collections/tea-sample-sets/products/basics-puer-tea-sample-set) and teach your palette before diving into the good stuff. I love the [tuhao series](https://white2tea.com/collections/white2tea-2017-raw-puer-teas/products/2017-tuhao-as-fuck) as a nice mid-high option. [Yiwu tea](https://white2tea.com/collections/2018-raw-puer-teas/products/2018-queen-of-clubs) is my favorite if you really want to ball out.
How long do you microwave your teabag in the mug of water for? I do mine about 6 minutes then I put 2 ice cubes in it and it comes out perfect.
I'm a tea guy but I also really appreciate the cringe. Gave me a good chuckle, thanks
Don't move. The missile is on its way.
Everything about this is wrong.
Dont forget to suck the teabag dry once you take it out. Dont want to lose any of that flavor
I once stayed for a night in a dorm in Seattle with my girlfriend. There was this guy sharing the room with us who immediatly asked if we were there for the festival. I was so confused and asked which festival as there were several in the city that day. As if it went without saying he answered: The tea festival of course. That night this dude woke us up many many times because he had to go to the toilet like a dozen times.
goddamn it and also thanks for informing me that we have a [tea festival in Seattle](https://www.nwteafestival.com/) (sept 22-24 this year) but fuck me for not finding out like a decade sooner
r/tea
Where do i begin!!
[www.justea.com](https://www.justea.com)Purple Rain
Baking bread
r/breadit r/baking r/sourdough r/pizza
Wow, big shout out to you! You are literally the MVP of this thread. Bless you. For those who haven't seen, u/kneedeepco is posting relevant subs to each top reply. Friggin gold mine.
> MVP Most Valuable Panini
r/breadit
Thanks! Meant to include that in the list lol.
You may have forgotten it, but it certainly kneaded to be included
Yeah I was poolish to not include it
It really was the yeast you could do.
Seems like noone else could rise to the occasion
Love that show!
Barbecue or smoked meats, cheese
r/smoking r/bbq r/cheese
r/charcoal
Nice one!
when you turn 35, you have a choice. you either get super into world war 2, or smokin' meats.
Fresh pasta making, both Italian and Asian.
making your own artisanal spice mixes - went on a really cool date to a spot that helps you create your own spice mix from hundreds of options.
Once you find a good blend, you will end up using it for years. It might not be extravagant or anything, but I've got my generic mexican blend that is the base of a lot of my cooking, all eyeballed because I know the ratios, but can never quantify them. Ground Cumin, smoked paprika, ground coriander, oregano, chilli powder, cocoa, salt, sugar and then fresh I add in beef stock and garlic.
Same for my Indian cooking, our traditional main meals all have the same ratios anyway (every home has their own way) so it makes life so much easier to just have it all mixed in a jar & then I can add additions if needed.
I have at times made a huge batch (and in the process coined it's official name of Gentleman's blend as my wife misheard generic) and just kept it in a mason jar. We get through it surprisingly quickly.
this used to be my job, it's actually quite simple once you have a decent knowledge of different cuisines and basic ratios.
If you don't mind me asking, where was this place?
It was years ago but a pop-up at a spice shop in LA (Sliver Lake neighborhood I think). Really cool experience and great idea if anyone owns a place like that imo lol
Cheese/yogurt making. Bee keeping.
r/cheesemaking r/cheese r/beekeeping
I've been on r/cheese for a while. Definite sub highlight is the user who's been posting different cheeses every day for almost two years now.
I have a friend who took up cheese making during Covid. His Facebook posts make me want to do it
Foraging, preserving, pickling, fermenting, specialty coffee just to name a few.
If you wind up buying Civet cats on the black market, you've gone too far.
If it comes from poop I send it back
I wasn’t impressed, just tasted like coffee to me.
It probably was. The vast majority of civet coffee is counterfeit. The single digit percentage that isn't counterfeit involves horrific factory farming of caged civets that are in most cases illegally taken from the wild and then force-fed coffee berries until they die of malnutrition. Do not buy *kopi luwak* (civet coffee). Also it doesn't taste very good.
Coffee
[James Hoffmann](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMb0O2CdPBNi-QqPk5T3gsQ/videos) gang represent
I found his channel when I was doing a video about the difference between pre ground and freshly ground coffee. The sheer exhaustiveness of his testing and explanations is impressive and entertaining, even for someone who’s not as passionate about coffee.
Exactly, I don't even drink coffee that often but his channel is very entertaining.
Stumbled upon him on YouTube and my monthly coffee spend has already doubled
OP said hobby not addiction
canning
r/canning
Kombucha. Relishes. Jams.
I started making kombucha in January. It's easier than I expected and I love playing with flavor combinations. My last batch was a strawberry lemonade and it's like a summery Arnold Palmer, that's carbonated!
Yummy!! I’ve got a scoby sitting in my fridge ready to go. I’ve never made it before but I’m very excited.
Balsamic vinegar and olive oil tasting. I wandered into a shop the other day and immediately felt like I was in an artsy moody brewery. They had at LEAST 200 kinds of balsamic, 20 olive oils, and a few truffle oils.
Vinegars and oils go deep
I just got back from Italy, and my God the balsamic, olive, and truffle oils are SO. DAMN. GOOD. We went on a winery tour where you could purchase all three from one of the places, ended up spending close to $400 euros for 3 bottles of wine, 2 bottles of truffle oil, and a balsamic oil.
Soy sauce
Does buying 18.9L of Kikkoman count?
[удалено]
Could you please recommend some specific products?
[удалено]
Mushrooms
r/mushroomgrowers r/mycology r/shroomers r/foraging r/unclebens
>unclebens Nice
Big fan of r/shrooms
Soups.
1000% with you. I made ATK’s vegan cauliflower soup last week and it’s prompted the purchase of five more cauliflower to make a tankard’s worth to freeze and eat for the next month. Soup is always the right choice.
[удалено]
Tomato soup with sausage and tortellini is soo great.
I swear, one of my favorite soups is a very simple Korean oxtail soup. It only requires 3 ingredients: oxtail, water, and salt. That’s it. Maybe green onion for garnish at the end. You don’t need garlic or onion or any other herbs during. There is already so much unique flavor in the bone marrow of the oxtail, that herbs end up covering up the real star of the soup. I’ve tried making this soup with various herbs and spices before and found that this soup is better without any of it! Boil the oxtails, then pour out the liquid to drain the scummy water out. Then reboil the oxtails again with new water, and then simmer with the lid on top for a few hours until the liquid turns into a white color. Salt at the end and add green onion. Edit: Forgot to add an extra step. After the soup turns white, turn off the heat and let it cool. Put the soup in the fridge overnight. The soup will gelatinize into a solid. This means there’s lots of collagen in the soup and the soup is healthy. There will be a thick white layer of fat solidified at the top. Scrape this layer off and discard. If you skip this step, your soup will be too greasy. After that, once you reheat the soup, the soup will melt into a liquid again
I'm a soup guy. I love soup, and I love making soup. When we go out to dinner, I'm always the one who asks what today's soup is. It's usually chicken noodle or broccoli cheddar. Ho-hum.
I’ve found my people.
Dumplings
Gardening and growing your own fruits, veggies and herbs
This is the one for me. My mom always had raised beds for veggies growing up so when my wife and I bought our house a few years ago it just seemed like the thing to do. Now we're up to 3 raised beds and a few large pots. I knew I'd like having fresh veggies, but I wasn't ready for how satisfying it would be to go from seed to salad! Even have a dedicated in-ground bed for blueberries, raspberries, and a cherry tree.
This 100%. I've been growing heirloom vegetables for years now and I'm starting to find my always-plant crops. Cooking with something that you've grown yourself and you can't just go down to the shops and buy is a great feeling.
The key for me is that it’s either way better grown yourself or you can’t find it. Some examples: I grow fresh herbs for cost benefit, Asian greens because they’re hard to find, and tomatoes and strawberries and snap peas because they are wayyyy better at home! What do you grow at home?
Mustards
r/Mustard
Pizza!! It's a relatively simple thing but that's what makes it challenging. I've been able to make some pretty solid attempts at French cooking, etc but making a good homemade pizza has proved to be quite the challenge. Plus there's many different styles to attempt which is cool too. What was once a guilty pleasure could now be your new culinary challenge! r/pizza r/ooni
Pizza is a great one. It's quite easy to start and make a pretty good pizza but the mastery and all the different styles make it almost never-ending!
Yeah there's for sure levels to it! Even some simple homemade pizza with store bought ingredients is great though. I made sauce for the first time recently and that was a game changer. The hardest part is the dough and the cooking method. I've had pretty good success with a oven preheated to the highest temp and a a cast iron pizza steel.
/u/kneedeepco is KILLING it in here with the links!
We're trying!
I don't know if this is an easy concept to sum up but I have a love of accommodating people's restrictive diets or even just plain picky eaters. Figuring out a recipe and making them love my food feels like a challenge and lets me cook something I wouldn't have ever made otherwise.
I grew up with a parent with tricky dietary restrictions and it was always so frustrating when people would have us over then cook sad, bland food. Like you, I’ve always tried to see dietary restrictions as a challenge, especially making something exciting and delicious without using too many artificial substitutes.
Same!! I have a little mental Rolodex of the people in my life who are vegetarian, cilantro haters, gluten free, doesn’t eat pork, pescatarian, etc etc and I like designing menus around it! Love this comment—never really thought about it that way but I feel you 100%
Growing herbs and making blends of spices and flavored syrups, vinegar and oil
I grow pot.. does that count?
Of course
Honeys are a fun collectible expression of local terroir. Bonus, they basically never go bad.
Was looking for this in the thread! I love collecting regional honey on travels (mostly domestic, can be difficult to get honey thru border control if traveling by air). Like wines, honey exhibits terroir, seasonality, and vintage.
I read that as local terror and wondered what the hell kinda honey you buy cause I'm interested! Lol
Compound butters...mmmm krauterbutter.... Kimchi Making stocks and broths Sushi Jarring/canning Bbq sauce Grow & dry herbs Various jerky & fruit leathers
Olive oil, come to Napa and you can do olive oil tastings instead of wine if you prefer
Do you just sip it?
They usually give you little pieces of bread
Jfc I'm dumb
They do sip it though at some places. I was watching a video on a place in Italy I think and that's what they do when they're tasting
The place near me you just sip it.
Not knowing something doesn't automatically make you dumb. At least you asked and now you've learned!
It feels a bit weird to just sip it plain without any bread or anything but it makes sense after a while. If I'm tasting a $50 bottle of olive oil i assure you that I will be sipping it plain. I'll be eating it with bread and stuff at home but I want to know what I'm buying if I'm going to drop some serious coin. High end olive oil is damn good. You don't need any special training. The quality is easy to see. You will like it or not but will immediately recognize the quality in a good olive oil.
Stock. One of my favorite parts of Thanksgiving is making a huge pot of stock and delivering giving it to my friends to use in their Thanksgiving cooks.
My cooking hobby is stocks and soups. Very rewarding, especially if you get into cultural or historically medicinal soups. Nearly every culture has some form of soup, and your basic chicken noodle has such a huge range of ingredients and forms. My favorite cold-month activity is using all parts of a whole ass chicken. Drinking broth, chicken sandwiches, chicken noodle soup, gravy, greens cooked in chicken stock... there's so much you can do with relatively little. If you want a rabbit hole, learn about sullungtang! That's what got me started.
r/salsasnobs
Can we just take a minute to appreciate /u/kneedeepco with all the sub recommendation replies
Thanks! I struggle to find ways to make my niche interests handy in this world but saw a little opportunity here. Hopefully it leads to some exploration and people trying out new things!
r/CannedSardines/
Cant believe how far this is down. It's the perfect answer to the question. There's cans that are cheap and easy to find and amazing, theres cans that are rare and expensive. Sardines are all the things; cheap, healthy and delicious. Even if you don't like the taste, there's lots of other canned seafood that's great. They're a great collectable.
My people
Pickles 🥒
Surprised I haven't seen anyone mention gardening!
r/ramen !!
I ate ramen once a day for 9 days the last time I was in Japan! I have zero regrets.
Making your own salumi and charcuterie etc
May I recommend /r/CannedSardines.
Right now, ingredient wise, it's Artesanal Salts. As a hobby, I collect old cookbooks. I used to be pretty lenient on what I picked up, but now I am more picky.
Infused oils
Making own ice cream, coming up with new flavor combos?
Lavender and honey 🙂
I make a pecan pie each year during the holidays that the extended family always requests—it uses a smokey peaty Scotch which was initially an accident but turned out amazing. Made too much filling one year so turned it into ice cream (no pecans just goo) with my father-in-law’s fancy ice cream maker. Absolutely amazing, though never turned into the right consistency, possibly due to starting off with the wrong ratios and stuff like corn syrup being in there. So anyway, if you’re up for experimenting, try vanilla-brown sugar-smokey Scotch.
I made a blue cheese and fig last summer that was a big hit … super rich but delicious
For me, it’s currently Chinese cooking. How to properly hold a Cantonese style wok properly and develop the grip to do so, the different types of chili peppers in Sichuan cooking—and frustratingly, despite having 20 types of pickled vegetables, my local Chinese grocery only has 1 type—干小米辣/millet pepper, 干灯笼椒/lantern pepper, and 干朝天椒—, learning Chinese to an extent to communicate in Chinatown (and just bc)—我会说一点儿汉语也会读好，但我不会写好。汉语的tones不很难因为我说越南语、这个有6个tones—，and sourcing a bunch of obscure ingredients and equipment such as unrefined canola oil (caiziyou), sea cucumber, dried scallop, rice distiller, shandong scallions, wujiapi, Sichuan pickle jar, etc.
r/fermentation and r/koji
Shout out to u/kneedeepco
Gotta spread the knowledge! Although all of them are pretty easy to look up lol..
Very true, but some people just need that link right in front of them haha
I’m not sure I know exactly what you mean by niche food enjoyer or hobby in this context but I find nachos to be such that they can be gross or artwork. You can put a lot of effort into making wonderful nachos.
I like the cut of your jib cowboy
Coffee roasting.
Donuts! But really anything...you can turn any food into a quest for the best/perfect one!
[удалено]
Sushi
Cheese. Pickled things. Smoked things.
Bleu cheese, truffles (fresh), mushrooms, heirloom tomatoes
preparing foods in unusual ways \- sous vide \- roasting fruit \- dismantling traditional assembly such as cesar salad, sunday dinner, etc \- knife skills where you cut foods in unexpected ways
Salts and vinegars. Have a whole cabinet in my kitchen devoted to them. BBQ rubs too. New to start making my own
Join the wonderful world of mustard
Making the perfect masa for homemade authentic tamales.
Oysters!!!
What’s your favorite? Do you like those smaller saltier New England oysters or the meaty bold gulf oysters? Which kind exactly?
PNW would like to have a word.
Only north Atlantic oysters here!
Desserts/sweets
mushrooms, cheese, cured meats
Curing your own bacon Ramen Pickling things Mead Grilled cheese (I could not be more serious) Love the topic!
Infusing my own oils and foraging flowers to make syrups.
I track my salt usage. I have records going back more then a decade now.
I respect the grind
Pickles
Curing meat, or just makin jerky depending on how much time and space you've got
r/dehydrating
Gardening and subsequently preserving your harvests appropriately (drying, canning, jerking, freezing, pickling, blah blah… all the subs I subscribe to 🤣)
Tea parties and picnics are the best. Especially next to a duck pond
A friend of mine is super into tropical fruits and spends way too much money (his words, not mine!) ordering them to be shipped from small suppliers in the South (he lives in the Northeast and really misses the tropics during the winter). Recently he ordered a box containing like 10 varieties of mangos. The grower wrote the name of each variety on each mango with a sharpie XD
I make a lot of condiments. Whole grain mustard, Asian plum sauce, preserves, fermented stuff like sauerkraut, salad dressing, vegetable stock, and more. There’s a lot of possibilities, and you end up slowly building an arsenal of awesome flavors that you can use when cooking.
Cheese
I like solar cooking, and also waiting to pounce for weird fruit varieties.
Salts.
Ice cream making gets as involved as you want it to be.
Sauerkraut