Science of Cooking

Risotto, or at least the perfected version, is part skill, part luck. The hydration ratio needs to be perfect at all steps in order to get the intended consistency with any sort of regularity. Go to any restaurant that makes it fresh a few times and you'll get different results every time.

The making of Black Garlic is nearly impossible to get right with any sort of regularity, and takes SO MUCH TIME. You're dealing with possible contaminants at so many levels, equipment failure, and just plain luck. Slowly dehydrating while at the same time fermenting something is a fool's errand, and I'd like to meet the insane person who even thought this up.

Side note, I'm sorry I didn't see this was a science based community, I'm still interested in your answers but mods if you want I will remove the post

Omelette.

So many factors: fat-to-air ratio, time whisking, time resting, egg by itself vs. adding ingredients, pan temperature, length of heat exposure... And that's just chemistry. That doesn't even take into account the physics of folding and lifting.

really caputing the spirit of the NY pizza slice requires some really in depth study and uncommon equipment, from how the dough is developed to the fat and moisture content of the cheese to an oven hot enough to actually get it to cook right

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mee_ka_tee

A lot of ingredients especially if you make your own curry paste. Real easy to have too much or too little of anything. So many ingredients that you pretty much have to make a lot but it goes bad fast so you can't really store.

Plus some stuff taste a bit sour if boiled for too long and other stuff the flavor pretty much disappears if you boil too long so you have time it with when it'll be served. And it's just like any other bone stock dish where you can go hours to boil the bones. Then there's if you're doing just pork bones or you're doing pork bones and fish bones. It's a lot of timing that's really not worth the effort unless the restaurant is in a community with a lot of Lao people that know the cuisine and buy it rather than buy stir fried noodles dishes. It's a lot of steps. Sauteing parts, simmering parts, remove stuff in the pot to process process a bit to back in later or serve as a topping. There's fermented beans to put in you're high efforting this on the ingredients list

I've seen it go off the menu at multiple restaurants in the city I'm in and when asked why, the answer is always because the community the restaurant is in doesn't buy it and it doesn't hold well while it stays on the menu in communities with large Lao, Thai, Cambodian, Burmese, Malaysian. Indonesian, Viet people. The people in these communities are all like, "oh shit I never seen this on menus and I don't want to make that - too much work. Got to get that"

My most difficult dish was not in a commercial kitchen.

Sourdough Croissants. It is so hard to get everything the exact right temperature, the dough wants to tear, they were one of the best things I've ever tasted but technically so ridiculously difficult to accomplish.