We got a great response to last week's Casual Friday study on dessert preferences. However, I've realized that there's one more bit of information I need. Ideally I should have put this question in the survey itself, but it's too late for that, so this follow-up will have to do. I need to know what CogDaily readers think of the celebrity chefs we featured -- so I'd appreciate it if you responded to this poll (whether or not you took the survey). Here are the chefs that were featured in the survey:
Now for the secret about the study. While we were interested in the question of whether people like "light" desserts, what we were really interested in is whether the physical qualities of the dessert chef affected reported preferences. In other words, would you rather eat a dessert prepared by a chef who is overweight? Would a skinny chef make a better "light" dessert? We'll see tomorrow if the chefs included with each recipe made a difference in the results.
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Uh, if I may nitpick, neither Sandra Lee nor the Barefood Contessa are chefs. Sandra Lee can barely boil water, and before becoming a Food Channel celeb, the Contessa ran a gourmet grocery store. A chef runs a commercial kitchen of some sort. Everyone else is just a cook.
Good point, Harlan. That's one of the reasons we're doing a follow up poll. I'm not sure if the semantic issue is as important as readers' perceptions of these individuals' ability to prepare good desserts.
Furthermore, neither Sandra Lee nor the Barefoot Contessa are IRON CHEFS!!!
If you were really looking at light/heavy dessert preferences with regard to the heftiness of the chef, you probably should have chosen pictures of chefs many people didn't already have opinions about. But at least you didn't use Rachael Ray. That would have completely blown the credibility of any recipe, light or heavy.
I answered the dessert questions, but never looked at the picture of the chef. Maybe to check to see whether the chef matters at all, there should have been recipes with no photo?
Ok - I think this one is flawed - sorry :-)
I happened to know beforehand the cooking styles of these chefs/cooks - so I know that barefoot contessa's recipes are always high-fat and delicious. So my answer for the second poll should be discounted.
Even so - I studied the recipes closely and picked the one I thought would taste the best regardless of the who was attached to the recipe. A more interesting stat would be if you paired the low-fat recipes with the "heavy" chefs. (or you probably randomly did that)
cheers anyways with your great blog...
Interesting. I suspect I may have skewed your results a bit, then, because I answered based entirely on the fact that I am allergic to casein, and thus both recipes would make me ill.
I do love many of Mario Batali's recipes, though most often his meat recipes.
Why no love for Cat Cora?
You've got gender confounding this, as well as the professional/amateur split. It's not apples and oranges, it's apples and hex bolts.
yeah, I wondered whether it was a gender study...
I hated the light dessert, even though it was supposed to come from Batali. Since I kinda knew that the desserts were not really by those "chefs", I did give much weight to who was supposed to be the creator, and focused on the recipe ingredients. Maybe if you had made the picture bigger or placed it in a more prominent space it would have been a differentiator for me, but as it is it looked fake and like an afterthought.
Sorry, I should have said I did NOT give much weight to...
I have a skinny daughter who makes absolutely scrumptious food (high-fat, high sugar, great flavour) when she's on a diet (which she doesn't need). Otherwise, her cooking is average.
So the physical condition of the chef doesn't sway me either one way or the other.