14. Cooking Shows

Wait a minute…..everyone fucking likes cooking shows now as evidenced by the huge success of MasterChef and spin-offs like My Kitchen Rules. 


It’s one thing for a foodie to read about how to cook something from a cookbook, it’s another thing to visually see someone cook something. One of the hardest things to put into words is the ‘how’ of cooking something. Attending cooking classes is one way for a foodie to watch someone cook something but television offers a cheaper alternative in the comfort of your own home. With the increasing popularity of cooking shows, foodies have been switching their TVs on again to watch ‘how’ celebrity chefs and contestants dish up food.


Foodies can now engage in work water-cooler conversations as colleagues discuss last night’s episode of MasterChef and show off their expertise in the art of cooking, and impress their colleagues by revealing that they have interests (a life!) outside of work.


Whether or not foodies are interested in sport, sport is a very important part of Australian culture. By watching cooking shows, foodies can also feel that they are engaging in spectator sport with contestants cooking off against each other as individuals or in teams, eliminations, judging, there are winners and loosers, and kitchens are not just kitchens – they are kitchen STADIUMS!

13. Blogs

The blogosphere allows people with similar interests to connect and share information with each other no matter where they are. 


Foodies have embraced the phenomenon of blogging and there is an ever-expanding number of food blogs in cyberspace. 


Foodies will read numerous food blogs for other peoples thoughts on food, experiences with recipes and reviews of eateries. 


Foodies want to share their own musings on food by commenting on other people’s blogs or having their own blog to document their eating and cooking experiences. 


Food blogs provide a great resource for recipes and inspiration for cooking new dishes, and can be used to learn how to cook as people detail their cooking endeavours and write about their failures and provide helpful tips. 


Food blogs also let foodies know where they should or shouldn’t eat. Watch out restaurants, cafes and bars….now anyone can be a food critic!


More importantly, food blogs are the best source for food porn (it's free and unrestricted)!

12. Sea Salt

Ignore all the talk about salt being bad for you and that you should consume less of it. Salt is a very important seasoning for food. It is a taste enhancer and taste modifier. It strengthens the impression of aromas that accompany it and it suppresses the sensation of bitterness. 


Salt is primarily comprised of sodium and chloride, and comes from the sea in one way or another but there are considerable differences between table salt (probably the more widely used salt by the general populace) and sea salt. Commerical table salt is obtained from the salt deposits which are mined, heat-blasted and chemically treated. The process of producing table salt strips it of all minerals other than sodium and chloride, and some anti-caking agents are added to table salt to make it free flowing. Sea salt is obtained through the evaporation of seawater and as it is unrefined, sea salt maintains its natural mineral content (such as iron, sulfur and magnesium). Thus, sea salt has more flavour and will make food taste better than table salt. 


Using salt properly is one of the most important skills in cooking. There is that saying “being worth one’s salt” - a foodies preferred salt to add finesse to meals is sea salt. You should use salt liberally in cooking, but do not under-season or over-season - it’s all about balance!

11. Wine

Although many people wouldn’t be overly concerned about what wine they serve with dinner, the reality is that the proper wine choice will complement the food you eat. Foodies value the matching of wine with food as certain elements (such as texture and flavour) in both food and wine react differently with each other, and finding the right combination of these elements will enhance the dining experience. Foodies seek to increase their knowledge of what are good wines and what wine should go with different foods. It is also important to only cook with wine that you would drink!

10. The Australian Gourmet Traveller

The Australian Gourmet Traveller is the country’s premier food and travel magazine. It also has a website which contains lots of great recipes, inside news on food and wine, food guides, reviews of restaurants and information on great travel destinations. 


A foodie would have used the Australian Gourmet Traveller as a source for recipes many times and eagerly awaits their annual restaurant awards, wine lists of the year, travel awards and top 100 lists.

9. Post-Christmas and End of Financial Year sales

While most people look forward to the Post-Christmas sales and End of Year Financial sales to stock up on work clothes, bed linen, to improve their home theatre entertainment system by buying a new TV even though the one they have at home works fine….etc.


A foodie will head straight towards the kitchen appliances and cookware section, and see it as an excuse to buy more kitchen gadgets and gizmos, even if you have don’t have any more room in your kitchen for them or it’s something that you will rarely use. You need no other justification other than it’s on sale because good kitchen cookery and gadgets are not cheap! 

8. Kitchen Gadgets

Most people would own some basic kitchen gadgets such as a garlic crusher, can opener, measuring cups, vegetable peeler etc.


A foodie goes beyond this and owns gadgets like a kitchen timer (a normal clock will not do) thermometer, a kitchen blowtorch, a digital kitchen scale, microplane grater(s), pasta machine, meat mincing machine, a pressure cooker, slow cooker, immersion blender…

7. Cookbooks

Everyone owns a cookbook or two, or maybe more, but the cookbook shelf of a foodie will be distinguishable as they will own one or more of the following cookbooks:

• The Cook’s Companion by Stephanie Alexander;
• On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee;
• Larousse Gastronomique; 
• Ratio by Michael Ruhlman; and 
• some cookbooks from reputable, world renowned chefs (for example, Thai Food by David Thompson or The Fat Duck Cookbook by Heston Blumenthal)

6. Public Holidays

If you get pretty serious into cooking, you will realise that it is something which takes up a lot of your time. You will spend hours cooking, and in your day-to-day life, with working full-time and everything else (doing the washing, ironing, sleeping etc.), there is never enough time to spend on cooking as much as you would like to. 


Public holidays are great as not only does it mean that you don’t have to work, it is an opportunity to spend hours in the kitchen.


The best public holidays are the ones where you aren’t required to engage in family commitments like Christmas and Easter, such as Labour Day, Foundation Day and the Queens birthday.

Queen's Birthday

5. Friends

You need guinea pigs to try out your cooking (your dog can only take so much). Friends are suitable for this purpose, ‘real’ guinea pigs do not make great dinner guests and they are unable to provide intelligible constructive criticisms on your food.

Guinea pigs may look pretty cute when consuming your food and you can dress it up but you can’t take them out!

4. Dinner Parties

Once a foodie has honed their cooking skills, it needs to be showcased. Dinner parties are great forum for this. Dinner is the main meal of the day and also the most elaborate meal, where you get to dish up a few courses and be more creative with the menu (in case the entrée or main fail, you can always turn the night around with desert, everyone has a sweet tooth!). 

3. Making things from scratch

When you are learning how to cook, you will want to know how to make things from scratch like pasta, gnocchi, stock, bread, pastry, pizza etc. instead of buying the pre-made stuff from supermarkets. 


Once you master this, you will swear by it. Anything made fresh tastes better but it is also much more time consuming…is it worth it?


Total time to cook packet of pasta bought from supermarket = between 2-12 minutes (depending on the type of pasta).


Total time to cook freshly made pasta = around 67-73 minutes (10 minutes for mixing together the ingredients and kneading the dough, 30 minutes resting time for dough, around 15-20 minutes to roll out dough and cut it, 10 minutes to dry the pasta and 2-3 minutes to cook it in boiling water).


2-12 minutes versus 67-73 minutes! Your friends may think you are insane, considering the fact that nowadays you can buy freshly made pasta from the refrigerated section of the supermarket.


But you will say ‘It’s not the same!’ as you show off your battle wounds.
- bruises from kneading the dough
- strained wrist from winding the handle of the pasta machine
- bandaged wounds from cutting the pasta dough
- burns to your hand from boiling water


As that saying goes “you suffer for your art”…foodies are not an exception to this.

2. Cooking

Everyone has to cook food at some point, as we all need to eat. But cooking for a foodie is not just a part of the routine of life, like brushing your teeth. Cooking is like a hobby or sport for a foodie - something to study and engage in, in our free time. Foodies seek to understand the ingredients used and the proper preparation of food. 


For foodies, cooking offers a creative outlet, a great feeling of accomplishment when a dish has been cooked well, life is better when you are cooking as it allows you to unwind from working for the man and loose yourself in the processes… cooking makes us feel human.  


Any maybe cooking did make us human…


Harvard biological anthropologist, Richard Wrangham, published a book in 2009 called Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human which argues that cooking was what facilitated our evolution from ape to human, and examines the central role that cooked cuisine has had on the biological and social evolution of humanity.

1. Food

There are only few things that human beings need in order to survive – shelter, water and food. 


Here’s a rough survival guide:
1. Humans cannot survive more than three hours exposed to extremely high or low temperatures.
2. Humans cannot survive more than 3 days without water.
3. Humans cannot survive more than three weeks without food. 


Thus, Food = Life.


But foodies do not just like food as a matter of survival, foodies have an ardent or refined interest in food - they want to learn everything about food and be culinary experts. 

Hi and welcome to Stuff Foodies Like...

I have to confess that this blog was inspired by the likes of Stuff White People Like and Things Bogans Like. I did a search on the internet and found that there is no equivalent blog on foodies (however, I may be wrong, I do not know everything about anything). Foodies like stuff and things too! If white people and bogans can produce more than 100 random points about themselves, then why not foodies?!

So with this blog, I will present to the world – STUFF FOODIES LIKE.

I hope you will enjoy my observations on the subculture of foodies….please take everything with a pinch of salt.

I welcome comments and suggestions :)

A.