I'm Just Here for the Food (2 page)

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If the food is an existing hunk or hunks of something to be cooked, you can generally mess with seasonings, herbs, spices, and so on to your heart’s content.

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Foods within the same family can be substituted for one another (green onions in place of leeks, for instance), although the results will not taste exactly the same.

•
Ingredients with similar flavor profiles can also be substituted for one another. For instance, anchovies can stand in for capers.

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Never do in a covered pan what you can do in an oven.

The one place you shouldn’t substitute tools is in baking. Baking is all about Mother Nature, and as we all know, it’s not nice to fool (or fool with) Mother Nature. If a cake recipe says “8-inch round cake pan,” go to the store and buy three or four 8-inch round cake pans. You’ll be glad you did.

Once you’ve pondered the materials, look over any times that are mentioned. Even if the time that a particular step takes is a little nebulous, a good recipe should give you approximates. If not, guess for yourself. Add up all the times and make sure you don’t have any issues. Many novice cooks have decided at 5:15 P.M. to embark upon cassoulet and then went to bed hungry. Review the verbs sear, grill, roast, fry, boil, braise—are you sure you know what they all mean?

You’re almost ready to go to the kitchen. I usually run down to the office and make a copy of the recipe and stash the book or magazine. Not only are copies easier to work with—ever tried holding a book to your exhaust hood with a magnet?—you can make notes on them without having to ponder posterity. When the dust clears you can write your summary on the back and stash the thing in a three-ring binder. (Nerdy yes, but this kind of thinking landed me a television show.)

Now to the kitchen. Assemble the
mise en place
³
. The concept is simple: wash, chop, and measure all ingredients (or
software
, as I like to think of it) and gather all
hardware
before you start cooking. It doesn’t matter what you’re cooking or whether you’ll be doing it in five minutes or five hours,
mise en place
can save your hide. This is especially true when you’re in a hurry (a quick dinner), bleary-eyed (breakfast), or busy being charming (a dinner party where everyone comes into the kitchen and demands that you be charming).

My own
mise en place
method concerns a tray and a bunch of small reusable rectangular containers. I measure each item into its own container and stack the containers on top of each other in the order they’ll be used, so that the top box is the only one that needs a lid.

With
mise en place
in place, check the recipe once more for hidden dangers and booby traps. Overlooking a little phrase like “preheat oven” is an insidiously easy way to destroy a soufflé (which is in turn a great way to destroy your entire day). Recipe writers do err on occasion, and it’s not unknown for an ingredient to pop up in the procedural text without having been properly announced in the parts list (Internet recipes are notorious for this kind of thing).

Walk up to a cold residential oven and turn it to any temperature—say 350° F. Depending on your model, within a few minutes the oven will politely chime, telling you that the target temperature has been reached. What exactly does it mean by that? It means that the air inside the oven has reached 350° F. The moment you open the door to slide in your edible, most of that heat takes a hike toward your ceiling. Recovering that temperature can take quite a while, especially if the item you placed inside is large (say a turkey) and cold (shame on you for not bringing it to room temperature, but more on that later). At the very least, your cooking time calculations are going to go whacko and at the very worst, your food (a batch of cookies for instance) could be ruined.

Luckily you can help your oven keep its word by allowing it to continue heating for twenty minutes after it tells you it’s ready to go. That will give the mass of the oven—the walls, ceiling, and floor—time to get good and hot. Once that’s happened, they will be able to lend heat to the cooler air, allowing it to “recover” much faster.

If your oven is a little light in the mass department, you might consider leaving a pizza stone in it all the time as a kind of thermal regulator.

End of lecture number one, beginning of lecture number two.

The most underused tool in the kitchen is the brain. I blame the food media (yes, that of which I am a part) who have lulled us into a state of recipe slavery. We don’t
think
about recipes as much as we
perform
them.

As I have stated, I not only use recipes, I even try to memorize them from time to time so that I can ponder their finer points. But don’t think for a moment that recipes can replace knowledge. For example, one of the best omelets I ever had started out as a busted hollandaise. You could collect egg recipes all your life and still miss the relationship between these two dishes.

Cooking requires not just knowledge (which can simply be absorbed and regurgitated) but understanding, and understanding requires thought. If that seems a little too Zen-like for you, try one of these experiments.

ADAPT SOMETHING

Take a recipe that you really enjoy and feel confident making and change it around.

• Change Veal Scalopini into Turkey Scalopini.

• Trade fresh mushrooms for dry in a pasta sauce.

• Cook something that’s usually served raw, like lettuce.

• Change a “grill” to a “sauté.”

HOST A “REFRIGERATOR ROULETTE” PARTY

Invite a couple of friends over and ask them to bring three food items. Put the food in the middle of a table and figure out what to do with it all. This is a home version of the game that chefs have to play when they audition for jobs—an applicant is given a selection of ingredients and a set amount of time to do something with it.

What I’ve come to understand is that a lot of folks don’t want their own food. They want Mario Batali’s food, Charlie Trotter’s food, Thomas Keller’s food. I like that food too, but I have no desire to cook it. I want
them
to cook it.

Taking control of ingredients is the first step in taking ownership of food. If I set out to execute a recipe and decide to substitute basil for mint, or use plums instead of peaches, or red wine rather than white, I am taking the first step toward laying claim to that food. Sure, there are times when measuring is darned important. As I’ve said, baking rewards the cavalier with flattened cakes, tunneled muffins, cookies that crack, and soufflés that suffer. But by and large, cooking is a highly flexible craft and unless you make a point of stretching it a little every now and then you’ll never know what you or it are capable of.

Recipes are written so that if you follow them to the letter the dish will succeed. This doesn’t mean that if you don’t follow them to the letter you won’t succeed, either. And if you do mess up a few dishes in the name of education—hey, it’s only food.

WHY BOTHER COOKING?

Early man ate critters raw, so why change? There are a couple of very good reasons. Heat breaks down meat and vegetable fibers alike, making them a heck of a lot easier to chew and digest. Heat kills parasites and microorganisms that can do nasty things. And heat makes foods taste better.

Many physical and chemical changes take place during cooking, from the caramelization of sugars to the coagulation of proteins. Cooking also causes chemical reactions by breaking down cell walls that normally keep reactive substances away from one another. When they do combine, these substances may give birth to a vast brood of new flavor elements. Garlic, for example, only tastes the way it does when it is cooked because two rather simple chemicals combine and then fraction to create hundreds of new compounds.

Finally, the tongue does a better job of tasting when the food to be tasted is warm. (If you don’t believe this, take two scoops of ice cream and microwave one of them until warm and soupy. Taste it alongside the frozen scoop. The warm liquid will taste much sweeter.)

In recent years, the raw food movement has grown strong, especially in California. While I can appreciate what its proponents are attempting to do, it seems to me that the evolution of our species hinged on our ability to use fire, not only for heat and protection, but also to cook food, thus liberating more of the available nutrients.

Heat

A lot of the ink in this book is dedicated to the pondering of heat. If cooking is itself defined by the application of heat, then it seems to me that a smart cook would want to know as much as possible about this force. Here’s a brief primer.

THE LOWDOWN ON HEAT

Through the ages a lot of great gray matter has pondered the nature of heat and come up with the wrong answer. As recently as the late eighteenth century, heat was still thought to be a kind of invisible liquid, which was dubbed “caloric.” Then, a guy titled Count Rumford, who happened to be the war minister of Bavaria (even though he was an American), noticed that when cannon barrels were drilled, the same amount of heat was produced regardless of the amount of material involved. He deduced from this that heat and movement are closely related, and since heat can be harnessed to do work and can travel through a vacuum, it must be a form of energy. As a reward, Rumford had a baking powder named after him.

At its most basic, heat can be described as energy. If an object is hot, you can bet its molecules are in motion. This motion can be set off by:

Chemical reaction.
The temperature of the human body is the result of chemical reactions—our consumption and digestion of food is tallied in calories, which are actually units of heat.

Mechanical friction.
Rub two sticks together and you get heat; get enough of it and you can make fire. Heat is also created by the friction of electrons moving through a metal coil that provides some resistance. The cigarette lighter in your car and the coils of an electric cook top work this way. And when you place a metal pan on that coil, electrons move through it and heat the pan as well.

Radiant energy.
Although those versed in quantum physics would argue the point all the live-long day, for the humble cook let it suffice to say that radiation simply refers to energy that travels in waves, be they visible (photoelectrons) or not (microwaves). Waves create heat by vibrating the molecules they hit. Light waves and infrared waves carry a lot of energy, but cannot penetrate very deeply. Microwaves can penetrate deeply into certain tissues, but they carry a relatively low dose of energy. Gamma waves carry a lot of energy and can penetrate very deeply indeed, which is why nuclear weapons have a nasty reputation.

DEFINITIONS

Degrees
(either Fahrenheit or Celsius) are units of heat measurement—not heat units. In the kitchen, the heat units we need to be concerned with are BTUs and calories.

A
BTU
(British thermal unit) is the amount of heat energy required to increase the temperature of a pound (pint) of water by 1° F.

A
calorie
is the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water from 58° to 60° F. Although any heat-producing device, from a refrigerator to a nuclear power plant, can be rated in calories, the term is usually used to describe the potential heat energy of food. So the next time you feel bad about noshing on that 378-calorie candy bar, rest easy in the knowledge that your body can, through various chemical reactions, produce enough heat to warm 13.3356 ounces of 58° F water by 2° F.

Physical reaction.
Fire is a physical reaction wherein a fuel (oxygen) combusts in the presence of a catalyst (a chunk of charcoal).

When it comes to getting heat to food, there are really only two methods of transferal: radiation and conduction. Radiation works on food via waves, conduction is a little trickier.

Basically, conduction is what happens when a piece of matter that’s hot comes into direct contact with another piece of matter that isn’t. Since heat always moves toward areas of lesser heat, the hot matter makes the less-hot matter hotter. The transferal matter in question can be anything from air to a chunk of metal. However, different types of matter react differently when hot. Metal atoms, locked in a crystalline structure, can only vibrate and pass the energy along—like those funny contraptions you see in executive offices with the series of suspended metal balls; when you lift one and let it fall, the one on the far end swings up. The atoms that make up water and air are different: they’re fluid and can move about freely—and this changes everything. Left to their own devices, hot gases and liquid molecules will expand and (becoming less dense) rise. As they give up their heat to other bodies, they cool and sink, thus setting up a natural convection current. Whether in an oven, a pot of water, or a desert, the effect is the same.

The faster the convection current, the more hot matter comes in contact with the item to be heated—in our case, food. This means that a blast of 150° F air can cook something faster than a 500° F oven. Don’t believe it? Try this experiment:

Buy an ice cream cone on the hottest day of the year and eat it in your car in the parking lot with the windows up (no air conditioning please). The cone will indeed melt, but unless you’re in Death Valley it won’t happen so quickly that you can’t keep up with it. Now, buy an identical cone on a cold day and eat it while driving with the windows down. The cone will melt much faster—so fast in fact that you probably won’t be able to stay ahead of it. Even though the air is much cooler, more of it is coming into contact with the cone, so there is more transference of heat.