Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food (7 page)

For a good history on food, see
http://www.foodtimeline.org
.

PHOTO BY BLAINE COOK; USED BY PERMISSION OF MAUREEN EVANS

Maureen Evans posts recipes on Twitter (@cookbook) limited to the length of a single tweet (140 characters). See her book
Eat Tweet
(Artisan) for more recipes.

How did you come up with the idea to tweet recipes?

I noticed there wasn’t a place for home cooking in people’s lives anymore, but there was still a lot of passion about the idea. I just on a whim started writing these recipes on Twitter because a lot of my friends are geeks and they were the early adopters.

Fitting something down into 140 characters has got to be a real challenge.

I approach cooking as a metaprocess. I’ve never been one with a lot of patience for long-winded recipes. When I’m in the kitchen, I look at the overall processes and steps. I don’t find it too tricky to apply the way I think about recipes into these tiny clauses. I’ve sort of invented a grammar around cooking based on punctuation in order to cram as much information in as possible. Even a semicolon can convey a break in the cooking steps.

It sounds like the recipes are written for somebody who already knows how to perform the individual steps?

The first step when I write the recipe is trusting the intelligence of the reader, even if they’re just a beginning cook. People have the capacity to figure things out and to know when something looks right or wrong. I think the most geeky aspect of the recipe is the spirit that anyone can try things and tinker with them and learn by doing.

Any final thoughts?

Really, really old recipes tended to be about one line. I have one here from
Famous Old Receipts
by Jacqueline Harrison Smith from 1906 for popovers and all it says is “Popovers: 1 egg well beaten, 1 cup sweet milk, 1 cup sifted flour, salt to taste. Drop in hot tins and bake quickly.” That’s it. People today are kind of freaked out by making that, but obviously back in the day, 112 characters was enough to explain stuff.

RT @cookbook...

Hummus:
soak c dry chickpea 8h. Replace h2o; simmer3h@low. Drain. Puree/season to taste+⅓c tahini&lem&olvoil/½t garlic&salt/cayenne. Chill.

Garden Soup:
brwn ½lb/225g chopd chickn/onion/3T oil; +t s+p/2T wine&herbs/bay/2c pep&carrot&tom/c orzo/5c h2o. Simmr15m. Top w parm&olvoil.

Yam Leek Soup:
saute leek&onion/T buttr/t piespice. Simmr20m+4c stock/3c yam/tater/bay. Rmv bay; blend+½c yogurt/s+p. Top w tst pumpkinseed.

Lemon Lentil Soup:
mince onion&celery&carrot&garlic; cvr@low7m+3T oil. Simmer40m+4c broth/c puylentil/thyme&bay&lemzest. Puree+lemjuice/s+p.

Spice Cookies:
cream 8T butter&sug; +egg/t vanilla. Mix+2c flour/t cinnamon/½t bkgpwdr&salt/dash cayenne. Chill/roll/cut~25. 15m@350°F/175°C.

TWEET RECIPES USED BY PERMISSION OF MAUREEN EVANS

Prepare four duck legs, confit-style, as described in
Chapter 4
(see
Duck Confit
). This can be done days in advance and stored in the fridge. If you’re not in the mood to wait a day or don’t have a slow cooker, check if your grocery store sells prepared duck confit.

In a large pot, bring salted water to a boil for making pasta.

Prepare the duck meat by pulling the meat off two legs of duck confit, discarding the bones and skin or saving them for stock. In a pan, lightly sauté the duck leg meat over medium heat to brown it.

Add to the pan:

Simmer the tomatoes and tomato sauce for five minutes or so. While the sauce is simmering, cook the pasta per the directions on the package:

Once the pasta is cooked, strain (but do not rinse) the pasta and add it to the sauté pan. Add and stir to thoroughly combine:

Want to see a video of me making this? Visit
http://www.cookingforgeeks.com/book/duck-confit-sugo/

Notes

So, what can go wrong in making this dish?

Start by gripping near the bud end of the plant.

To strip the leaves, run your fingers down toward the base of the stem.

PHOTO USED BY PERMISSION OF LYDIA WALSHIN

Lydia Walshin is a professional food writer who also teaches adults how to cook. She founded Drop In & Decorate, which supports and hosts cookies-for-donation events to benefit local community agencies and shelters in more than 30 U.S. states and across Canada. Her blog, The Perfect Pantry, is at
http://www.theperfectpantry.com
.

Tell me a bit about your blog.

The Perfect Pantry is a look at the 250 ingredients that are in my pantry with recipes for how to use each ingredient. Every time I would open my refrigerator or go into the cupboard, there were things I used every day in the front, and then things in the back that I’d bought for one particular recipe and never used again. The blog is about all of the ingredients in the pantry and giving people different ways to use the things they’ve already bought.

How do you go about learning what to do with unfamiliar ingredients?

The best way to learn how to use something new is to substitute it in something familiar. So, for instance, I have a great butternut squash soup that I make in the fall and winter. When I get a new spice that I think might have similar characteristics to something in that soup, I start by making a substitution. First, I’ll substitute part of the ingredient for part of another ingredient, and I’ll see how that tastes. And then maybe I’ll substitute that ingredient entirely.

Using the butternut squash soup as an example, my recipe uses curry powder, which in itself is a blend of many ingredients. Recently I discovered an ingredient called vadouvan, a French curry powder. How do I learn the way vadouvan behaves? I put it into something I already know, and I say, if I take half the curry powder and substitute it for vadouvan, how does that change the taste? And then the next time I make it, I substitute vadouvan for all of the curry powder, and how does that affect the taste?

Once I understand the difference between something that’s familiar and something that’s unfamiliar, then I can take that into other kinds of recipes. But if I start with a recipe that I don’t necessarily know, and it uses an ingredient I don’t know, then I don’t know what the ingredient has done in the recipe, because I can’t isolate that ingredient from the recipe as a whole.

You speak of isolating ingredients almost like how a programmer would when writing code: isolating one variable at a time and going through and changing just one thing to see how the system changes. One thing I think a lot of geeks and techies forget to do is to take that set of skills that they have in front of the keyboard and go into the kitchen with that same set of skills, to apply that same methodological approach to food.

Except that the outcome might not be as quantifiable or predictable when you’re cooking, but that’s the nonscientific part of me saying that cooking, to me, is both an art and a science. You need to know some fundamentals. It only takes one time making tomato sauce in a cast iron pan to realize that it’s not a good idea from a science point of view and from a taste point of view — it’s pretty darn awful to watch your sauce turn green and bubbly. So you need to understand the basic fundamentals of science in order to cook, but you don’t need to be a scientist in order to cook, and you need to accept
the fact that your outcome might be a bit more random than if you were sitting in a computer lab.

What are the basic science fundamentals that you see people failing to understand?

I can tell you the place that I fail constantly is in baking. I’m not a baker, I’m not a measurer. I still don’t really understand the difference between baking powder and baking soda. I think understanding how acids react with all food is important. And understanding how salt reacts with foods, understanding things that are opposites. If something is too salty, you don’t necessarily put in something sweet in order to balance the flavor. Having a fundamental knowledge of those things enables you to cook without recipes and also to look at a recipe that might be faulty and figure out where the faults are.

One of the assumptions that many cooks make, especially when they’re starting out, is that if it’s published in a cookbook, it must be true. Well, not true. Cookbooks are subject to bad editing, bad writing, and bad recipe testing. You can faithfully follow a recipe in a cookbook and at the end have something that goes right into the garbage disposal, and it’s not your fault. It might be your fault, but there’s an equally good chance that it’s a flaw in the recipe. If you know enough basics, you can look at a recipe and say, “Wait a minute, there must be a typo here, this just isn’t going to work.”

The first thing that I tell students when they come to cooking classes with me is to read the recipe all the way through. This is the biggest reason that people’s cooking goes awry; they do not read the recipe. You can’t start cooking without reading to the end and knowing where you’re going. The biggest, biggest piece of advice that I can give any cook starting out, and even a lot of experienced cooks, is to take a minute, breathe deeply, and read the recipe first. Know from the beginning where you think you want to end up. Don’t start out thinking you’re making a soup and halfway through find out you’re making a stew, because it’s a recipe for disaster. That’s not science; that’s common sense.

I’m surprised at how often the people I interview say that it seems like people just aren’t using common sense.

I think there are several reasons for that. One is a lack of confidence that comes from not having grown up around cooks so that you’re afraid to trust your instincts, whereas if you’ve grown up making cookies with your grandmother for your whole life, then a cookie recipe wouldn’t scare you. I think there’s some fear of failure there.

I think there’s another thing that probably relates to science and common sense more than people realize: don’t poke at your food while you’re cooking it. If you have something cooking in a hot pan, and the recipe says either sauté it or cook until the onions are wilted or whatever it is, if you get in there with a spoon and you keep moving it around so that the food doesn’t have any chance to come into contact with the heat, whether you’re actually stirring or, as more often happens, poking, that food doesn’t ever cook. People see a recipe that says stir constantly; that doesn’t actually mean that you have to stir it so much that the food never gets hot. I have had to confiscate spatulas and spoons from my cooking students, set a timer and say, “Until the timer rings, you cannot stir the food again!”

I teach adults, so these are people who have been feeding themselves for their whole lives, and yet when I take a look at where their downfall is on a recipe, it’s always two things: they haven’t read the recipe, and they’re not giving the food a chance.

It does seem like there’s an American fetish with overstirring and poking.

Judging by what I see in my classes, absolutely.

Why do you think there’s a fear of cooking?

Honestly, I see this more in younger people, people in their 20s and 30s. I think our entire way of raising kids, educating kids, all of the pressures that we read about to succeed, and whatever punishment there seems to be for failure, seems to have translated to the kitchen. Not only are you supposed to be great at your job and great at being a parent, but you’re supposed to be a gourmet cook; and if you’re not a gourmet cook, then the fault is yours. I think that’s really kind of sad. Julia Child had the right idea: you drop a chicken on the floor, you pick it up, you wipe it off, and you just carry on. We have come to take cooking too seriously. We’ve come to take ourselves too seriously.

For me, once it stops being fun, I’m going to give it up, because I really do think that you should have a good time in the kitchen. I think you should make a mess in the kitchen. I think you should put some things down the disposal if nobody really should eat
them, and then you should go out for pizza, and it’s all okay. We don’t let it be okay anymore. That’s me. That’s my rant.

I’m surprised at how often the line of “you can always order pizza” comes up. That seems to be the universal go-to for when dinner ends up down the garbage disposal: just order pizza. So the secret to learning to cook in the kitchen is that it should be fun?

I think it’s critical that it should be fun, and I understand that there is survival cooking and there’s the weekday cooking that I used to do when we had young kids at home, but even that should be fun, and the better you are at it — not in terms of creating gourmet meals but in terms of understanding how to cook, how the fundamentals work, and making it not a painful experience for the cook — the better it is for everybody. If you’ve created your food with fun, and created it with or for people you care about, or just because you want to sit down and watch
Top Chef
on Wednesday night or whatever it is, if you’ve had a good time doing it, your food reflects that.