The Kitchen Counter Cooking School (50 page)

Tom was a judge on season six of
Top Chef,
while Thierry was a cheftestant on
Top Chef Masters
.

I originally selected nine women and one man, but the token male dropped out before the first class.

The Weight Watchers points system uses predetermined scores for food based on its nutritional value to help members avoid overeating.

I learned later they're plastic cans, a miracle of modern packaging science. The contents do not need to be refrigerated, but to make the product feel “fresh,” the marketers sell it that way.

Anne-Catherine took it in stride that she was edited out of my first book. She runs A Caprice Kitchen, a restaurant in Ballard, Washington. You should give it a try.

Forging is a means of shaping metal to produce a piece that is stronger than an equivalent cast or machined part, generally through the use of heat and pressure. Think hammer and anvil.

Metallurgists measure relative hardness on the Rockwell Hardness Scale, or HRC. Most knives score in the 54 to 60 range. Japanese brands tend to be harder than European brands. So a Japanese-crafted Shun or Global knife might score 61 HRC, while a German-made Wüsthof rates 56 HRC. In addition to hardness, there's carbon content. The most common steel recipe for knives worldwide falls into grades of 440 A, B, or C. The lowest, 440A, tends to be a soft steel that dulls easily, but it's cheaper and easier to manufacture than the higher-carbon variety, so most cheap knife blocks are 440A. That explains why so many bad knives exist in the world.

“Supertasters” is a term coined by Yale University researcher Linda Bartoshuk, who stumbled on the notion that people's ability to taste varies widely while doing studies on saccharin. Supertasters readily taste a bitter synthetic compound found in saccharin known as 6-n-propylthiouracil. Nontasters can't detect it at all.

If you've ever wondered what was inside the chicken, the “giblets” include the neck, the liver, and the heart. They're traditionally stored inside the bird's cavity. Poultry producers often sell chickens without these bits because consumers don't know what to do with them. Rodgers suggests simmering them with a few veggies in a quart of water for an easy chicken broth.

Determining accurate numbers for meat consumption is something of a dark art; the USDA puts the figure at sixty pounds per person annually, while the American Meat Institute says it more like one hundred pounds, with others putting figures somewhere in between. No matter the source, chicken beats beef.

The primary difference is in the age of the chicken, which in turn determines the weight and tenderness of the bird. A broiler/fryer weighs around three and a half pounds and is about ten weeks old. Roasters that tip the scales up to five pounds can be up to eight months old, while stewing fowl are even older. The odd bird out in her lineup was the capon, which historically was created by castrating a rooster to cause it to become a plump, tender bird; later, synthetic sex hormones were used for the same effect. Due to the industrialization of poultry, capons, stewing chickens, and older hens are rarities.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest reports that water or brine can account for as much as 15 percent of the weight in a package of chicken, and estimates that this practice generates $2 billion in added revenue per year for the poultry industry.

Induction works through magnetic transference; one molecule excites another through direct physical contact. When I was asked this question the first time during a demonstration, I thrust the microphone at Mike. He was forced to define it on the spot. It sounded quite sensual.

Presumably due to bad press, in 2010 the HFCS lobby asked the Food and Drug Administration for permission to shift its name to corn sugar.

Diammonium phosphate, also known as DAP, used as a yeast nutrient here, is also used as a fertilizer, to enhance the flavor of nicotine in cigarettes, and is widely added to fire-fighting agents.

By the end of 2008, more than 184,500 cases of BSE had been confirmed in the United Kingdom, according to the Centers for Disease Control. In humans, the disease manifests primarily as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJd), and as of October 2010, a total of 217 cases of vCJd had been reported in eleven countries. In the United Kingdom, the epidemic peaked in 1999. In North America, twenty-one cases of BSE had been reported by mid-2010, three in the United States and eighteen in Canada.

Denmark has the highest consumption of ground beef internationally.

This figure is based on studies by the Union of Concerned Scientists, which argues that heavy antibiotic use in animals may be a contributing factor in the rise of antibiotic resistance in humans who eat commercially raised meat.

The European Union is not so keen on North American beef. A blanket import ban has been the subject of intense political and legal wrangling. The World Trade Organization probably wishes the whole thing would just go away.

Corn is so complex that entire books and films are devoted to the subject. Two I recommend are the documentary
King Corn
and the book
The Story of Corn
by Betty Fussell (University of Mexico Press, 2004).

The reason why the term “natural” is less meaningful for chickens is because growth hormones are prohibited in poultry in general; the USDA allows minimal antibiotic use in “natural” chickens but doesn't specify the amount.

Pork shoulder is also known as pork butt or Boston butt, a historical reference to the butchering style used by Boston-area butchers that left more meat and less bone on the shoulder cuts. The pieces were typically shipped in casks or barrels, colloquially known as “butts,” hence the term.

On page 200 of my first book,
The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry,
I call for Chilean sea bass in a recipe. I suggest you try another responsibly caught whitefish instead. Thanks.

Farm-raised salmon is controversial. It takes three pounds of wild fish to grow one pound of farmed salmon, according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Most are farmed in open pens and cages in coastal waters, and it's easy for waste, parasites, antibiotics, and diseases from the penned fish to seep into open water. (Imported farmed shrimp has similar issues.) If you buy farmed salmon, try to stick to those that are referred to as “tank-raised” or “tank-farmed.”

Keta is the salmon formerly known as “chum.” In terms of quality, it's generally considered at the bottom of the salmon totem pole.

Regional guides are available for download at
http://seafoodwatch.org
.

Issues with food chemicals can crop up years after approval, yet the FDA lacks much power to investigate or pull approved chemicals off the shelves. Since it was introduced in 1993, consumers have filed more than four thousand complaints to the FDA about aspartame, more commonly known as NutraSweet. This chemical accounts for 70 percent of all complaints received by the agency for a variety of health claims. It remains a controversy, with each side claiming the other doesn't have enough proof.

There are other claims to the “original” Thanksgiving, both in Canada and by the Spanish in St. Augustine, Florida.

The U.S. Department of Labor reports that in 2008, the average American spent 5.6 percent of his or her wages on food eaten at home and 4 percent on food eaten in restaurants or fast-food joints, or a bit more than 9.6 percent total.