What Einstein Told His Cook (19 page)

GOOD NIGHT, SWEET RINSE

Recipes are always telling me to marinate overnight, soak overnight, let stand overnight, etc. How long is “overnight”?

I
’m with you. Why overnight? Are we to believe that daylight somehow interferes with the marinating process? What if it’s only two o’clock in the afternoon when we arrive at the critical point in the recipe? How early can “overnight” begin? If we do leave it overnight, must we proceed with the recipe the moment the cock crows? What if we have to go to work in the morning? How do you stop something from standing, for heaven’s sake?

Generally, “overnight” is intended to mean eight to ten hours, and in most cases even twelve probably wouldn’t hurt. But a carefully written recipe should let us set our own schedules. Just tell us how many hours, thank you; we’re old enough to choose our own bedtimes.

SKIM THAT SCUM!

When I make chicken soup, shortly after the water starts to boil around the bird, a foamy, white scum appears. I can skim most of it off, but the rest soon disappears. What is this stuff, and am I correct in removing it?

T
he stuff is coagulated protein, held together by fat. While it won’t hurt you, it won’t taste good and it’s best to remove it on purely aesthetic grounds.

When protein is heated, it coagulates. That is, its long, convoluted molecules unfold and then clump together in new ways. What happened was that some of your chicken’s protein had dissolved in the water where, as the temperature went up, it began to coagulate. Meanwhile, some of the bird’s fat had melted into oil which, as oil is wont to do, began making its way up to the water’s surface, because it is less dense than water. Wherever the two met, the oil coated the coagulated protein and acted as a life preserver, keeping it afloat as an oily scum. All edible stuff, but not a pretty sight.

As the temperature rises all the way to a simmer, the oil thins out and flows away, leaving the protein to continue clumping. It eventually forms those small brown particles that you can see in the finished soup—that is, if you haven’t removed the scum in its early stages. The scum hasn’t disappeared; it has just tightened up into those little brown specks, many of which will stick to the sides of the pot at the waterline, forming a kind of (excuse the metaphor) bathtub ring.

So skim away early and diligently and you’ll be rewarded with a nice, clear soup.

LOOKY, LOOKY, LOOKY. AIN’T THAT OOKY?

After I roast a chicken, there are all these ooky drippings in the pan. Can I use them for anything?

N
o. If you have to ask, you don’t deserve them. Pour off the fat, scrape the rest of the “ook” into a jar, and ship it to me by overnight express.

Seriously, this stuff is composed of marvelously flavorful juices and gels, and it would be a crime to feed it to your dishwashing machine. I have often thought that if I were a king or an emperor, I would order my cooks to roast a hundred chickens, throw them to the peasants, and serve the combined drippings to me on a silver platter along with several loaves of crusty French bread.

Or else I would soon have a barrel of the best gravy ever made, because all those wonderful fats, chicken juices, protien gels, and browned bits are the flavor foundations of great gravies.

JACK SPRAT WOULDN’T TOUCH IT

Why does my gravy turn out to be either lumpy or greasy?

I
t doesn’t have to be either lumpy or greasy. We all know people who can make it both lumpy and greasy at the same time, don’t we?

Lumps and grease arise from the same basic phenomenon: Oil and water won’t mix. In your gravy, you want some of each, but you have to trick them into blending.

First, let’s get some terminology straight. Oil, fat, and grease are the same stuff. It’s called a fat when it’s solid and an oil when it’s liquid. Any solid fat can be melted to a liquid, and any liquid oil can be solidified by cooling.

In their natural forms, solid fats are generally found in animals and liquid oils are found in the seeds of plants. But food professionals call them all fats anyway, because they play the same role in nutrition.

Grease
is an intermediate consistency between solid fat and liquid oil. The word has an unsavory connotation (a crummy restaurant is called a greasy spoon), and it is never heard at the dinner table except in the most dire of circumstances. In what follows, I’ll use the words
fat
,
oil
, and
grease
as necessary to get my point across. Or frankly, I’ll use whichever one I feel like using.

A bit more about nomenclature: Originally,
gravy
meant the juice that drips from meat while it is cooking. When a roast is served with that relatively unmodified liquid, it is said to be served
au jus
(o-ZHOO), which is French for “with juice.” (Menus that say “with
au jus
” were written by bilingual stutterers.) Unfortunately, most restaurant
jus
is just a powdered commercial “base” made of salt, flavorings, and caramel coloring, dissolved in hot water.

When you add other ingredients to the pan drippings and cook them together, you’re making gravy. And what, then, is a sauce? It’s made in a separate pan, usually by incorporating some of the same drippings, but augmented by any number of seasonings, flavorings and other ingredients.

Let’s talk about the most common kind of gravy: pan gravy made from the drippings of roast meat or fowl.

No one likes watery gravy, so a thickening agent must be used. That’s where flour comes in. Flour contains both starch and protein. Thickening a sauce with cornstarch or arrowroot, which are nonprotein-containing starches, is a totally different ball game, so don’t try to substitute them for flour in what follows.

When your turkey is done, remove it from the roaster and examine the godawful-looking mess in the pan. You’ll notice that there are two kinds of liquids: an oil-based liquid consisting of melted turkey fat and a water-based liquid, which is the juices from the meat and vegetables plus any broth or water that you may have added. The trick is to incorporate both of these incompatible liquids into your gravy, because each contains a unique set of flavors. That is, certain flavors are fat-soluble and others are water-soluble. Your goal is to get the fat-based flavors and the water-based flavors to mix into a smooth, homogeneous sauce.

It’s all in how you handle the flour, because flour is not only a thickening agent; it also does the job of blending the oil and water together.

Flour is a very fine powder containing certain proteins (glutenin and gliadin) that combine form a sticky substance, gluten, when they absorb water. Now if you were just to dump some flour into the roasting pan and stir, the proteins and the water would get together and form a sticky glop. And since the glop is water-based, the oil wouldn’t be able to penetrate it. You’d wind up with lumps of glop wallowing in a pool of grease. This may be standard fare in some households, but most experts agree that gravy should not be the chewiest part of a Thanksgiving dinner.

What should you do instead? It’s as simple as one-two-three (plus two): (1) You separate the watery and oily liquids from each other in one of those clever gravy separators that pour from the bottom. (The fat is the top layer, if you must ask.) (2) You mix the flour into some of the fat. This blend of flour and fat is called a roux (pronounced
roo
). (3) You cook the roux a bit to brown it and to get rid of any raw floury taste. (4) Only then do you slowly stir in the watery liquids. The flour, oil, and water will blend magically into a smooth sauce just as if they weren’t natural enemies. (5) Finally, you simmer the sauce to break down the flour grains and release their thickening starches.

Here’s how it works.

By mixing the flour with fat first, you ensure that each microscopic grain of flour becomes coated with oil, so that the watery juices can’t get through to gum up the flour’s protein. Then, when you stir the juices into the roux, the flour grains become widely dispersed, taking their coatings of fat along with them. And that’s exactly what you want: fat and flour uniformly dispersed throughout the liquid to make a smooth, homogeneous mixture. In short, you’ve persuaded the oil and water to fraternize by using the flour as a carrier of oil throughout the water. Then, when you simmer the sauce to let the flour do its thickening job, it does it uniformly throughout. No thick spots or thin spots. No lumps.

If you make your roux with too much fat, though, it won’t all be picked up by the flour, and the excess fat will just hang around in greasy little pools, ruining your reputation. On the other hand, if you use too much flour, it won’t all be coated by the available fat, and the extra flour will turn into lumpy library paste as soon as you add the watery liquid. So it’s essential to keep the amounts of flour and fat just about equal.

How much flour, fat, and watery liquid? To one part flour and one part fat, use eight or more parts of liquid juices and/or stock, depending on how thin you like it. Your gravy will be legendary.

A “gut brush” for cleaning out the cavities in raw poultry.