Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food (4 page)

Always
read through the entire recipe, top to bottom, before starting.

Cooking has the same types of hard constraints that code, hardware, and most science disciplines do. Processes (chemical or virtual), reactions, allocation of resources (more veggies!), and timing all matter. And while each discipline has standard techniques for solving these constraints, invariably there are other clever alternatives. Hacks don’t have to be quick and dirty (that’d be a hack job), or overly involved works of perfection.

Some of the best hacks start out as safe and stable ways of solving unexpected problems, and being able to see those solutions is what it means to think like a hacker. It’s rare to see a hack called for in a spec. Imagine a programmer coding a script that needs to count the number of lines in a text file. Standard method? Open, read a line,
++
, close. Five minutes until demo?
`wc –l "$file"`
. While the hack is easier and faster to write, you should probably understand open/read/close first and know how and when to use them.

If you’re new to the kitchen, buckle down and be prepared to learn the system from the inside out before breaking out the blowtorch, methylcellulose, or centrifuge. Every one of the well-respected chefs and instructors interviewed for this book has a thorough grasp of the fundamentals of cooking. Those who use tools like centrifuges and ingredients like methylcellulose use them as ways of extending those cooking fundamentals, not merely for the sake of novelty. To the pros, these newer techniques and ingredients simply expand their repertoires, taking their place alongside olive oil, flour, and other pantry staples.

Spraying a muffin tin on a dishwasher door.

Mug as plastic bag holder.

Strainer as splatter guard.

Roasting peppers in a toaster.

What does it mean to take the hacking mindset into the kitchen? Sometimes it’s technique. Rolling pizza or pie dough to a uniform thickness by eye can be tricky, but slap a few rubber bands on each end of the rolling pin, and you’ve got an instant guide. Need to pour spices or coffee grinds into a plastic bag? Drop the plastic bag in a mug or cup and fold the edge of the bag over the edge. “Hacking” can apply to the ingredients as well, as you’ll see in
Chapter 3
.

Metal bowl as double boiler.

Ways of doing things become obvious once you see them. The challenge in the kitchen is to see where you want to go and then find a path that gets you there. Thinking like a hacker means thinking of an end state and then figuring out how to get there in a time- and space-optimal (and fewest-dishes-possible) way.

How does one go about discovering hacks and tricks in the kitchen? Here’s a thought experiment: imagine you’re given a candle, a book of matches, and a box of nails, and asked to mount the candle on a wall. Without burning down the house, how would you do it?

The problem just described is called Duncker’s Candle Problem, after Karl Duncker, who studied the cognitive biases that we bring to problems. In this example, things like the paper of the matchbook have a “fixed function” of protecting the matches. We don’t normally think of the matchbook cover as a piece of thick cardboard that’s been folded over; we just see that as part of the matchbook. Recognizing the object as capable of serving other functions requires mental restructuring, something that the scriptwriters for
MacGyver
excelled at.

This mental restructuring is something that most geeks are naturally good at. All those interview puzzles common in the tech industry? You know: how would you start a fire with a can of soda and bar of chocolate?
^[
1
]
Or, you’re given 12 gold coins and a balance scale, but wait! One of the coins is fake, either lighter or heaver than the others, and the balance scale will magically break after exactly three uses. Problems like these almost invariably come down to breaking functional fixedness and overcoming confirmation bias (here, in the sense of being blinded to new uses by knowing previous uses). The obvious solutions to the candle problem — pushing the nails through the candle or melting the candle so that it sticks to them — will either split the candle or leave it too close to a wall to be safe. The solution, or at least the one Duncker was looking for, involves repurposing the box that had been holding the nails into a shelf. (I’m dreading all the emails I’m going to get with photos of this being done in other ways.)

Approaches for overcoming functional fixedness in puzzles, code, or the kitchen are the same. Understand what you actually have and what you’re asked to do, break it down into individual steps, and explore different possibilities for each discrete step. Take the quest for the perfect cup of coffee: can you isolate the variables for bean grind, temperature, pressure, etc. and then explore the combinations in a controlled way, varying just one variable at a time? Think about the ingredients you’re starting with and the end state you want, as opposed to the straight execution of a recipe. This way, when the execution inevitably veers off course, you can understand the step you are at and how to catch and correct the exception. Of course, be open to other possible outcomes — the way a meal turns out will sometimes be different than what you originally conceived.

Thinking about the end state will also help broaden how you think about cooking more generally. Cooking is not just about food in a pan; it’s about health and well-being, community and giving. Why do you want to cook? Watching your waist or your wallet? Health and finances are common considerations. Building community? Potlucks, shared meals, and barbeques can be fun social activities and even spur friendly competition. Expressing love? Cooking can be an act of giving, both in the literal sense of sustenance and in the spiritual sense of sharing time and breaking bread together.

Cooking also allows you to try new things — there are plenty of foods that you can’t order in a restaurant. Perhaps you want to get closer to your source of food, in which case learning how simple it can be to put together many common dishes will bring you at least one step closer. And then there’s getting yet another step closer: I happen to eat meat, but what I buy at the store is so far removed from a living, breathing animal that I find it hard to identify with the life of the critter. (The English language doesn’t help. We eat
beef
, but it’s a cow. We eat
pork
, but it’s a pig. Chickens don’t seem to be smart enough to merit a clear separation.) To properly respect an animal’s life, to understand where my food comes from and to be mindful of not wasting it, I feel that at some point I should have to butcher an animal myself. (You could try lobster, but I’ve yet to get teary-eyed over one.) For me, cooking is also as much about escaping from work as it is about satisfying hunger, not to mention having fun trying new things with friends and knowing that what I’m putting in my body is healthy.

Regardless of your reason for wanting to cook, realize that there’s more to cooking than just following a recipe. When looking at the end goal, think beyond the cooking stage. If your reason for cooking is to express affection, you should consider the sensations that your food brings your guests and the perceptions and reactions they have to it as much as the cooking itself. On the other side, if you’re cooking primarily for health or financial reasons, the quality and price of ingredients will be much more important.

If your goals are social, the end state isn’t the food on the plate; it’s the perceptions that are brought about by the experience of eating. If you’re making a meal for a romantic interest, give thought not just to the work done in cooking, but also the experience at the table. While you can’t control your guest’s perceptions, you do have control over the inputs, cooking, and sensations, all of which inform and shape those perceptions. Even something as simple as preheating your plates so that hot food remains hot can make an impact. (Cold sautéed fish and vegetables? Yuck.) For some, the extra effort of setting the table with nice flatware or festive plates can be a powerful signal of attention and affection.

The solution to Duncker’s Candle Problem, at least according to Duncker, is to use the box holding the nails as a makeshift shelf to hold the candle.

Here’s a way of thinking about this visually:

Stages and reasons for cooking.

We’ll cover the first column of the stages and reasons for cooking diagram,
Inputs
, in
Chapter 3
and give
Cooking
its due respect in
Chapter 4
and
Chapter 5
. Some elements from the final two columns,
Sensations
and
Perceptions
, are covered indirectly in
Chapter 6
and
Chapter 7
, since playing with textures and presentations is a great way to evoke memories. But the essence of sensations and perceptions is much more in the personal domain. If your reasons for cooking include being social, giving, and romantic, consider how to draw upon these aspects as you try things from this book.

Finally, for those who say presentation doesn’t matter, think about dining-hall food, and then check out Fancy Fast Food (
http://www.fancyfastfood.com
). How we approach food, from a food psychology and consumer behavior perspective, impacts our experience much more than we are typically willing to admit, even when confronted with hard data. See the interview with Brian Wansink on the next page for a story about his graduate students and Chex Mix to get a sense of just how far this denial goes!

Brian Wansink on Cooking Styles

PHOTO USED BY PERMISSION OF BRIAN WANSINK

Brian Wansink is a professor at Cornell University, where he studies the way we interact with food. His book,
Mindless Eating
(Bantam), examines how we make our choices about how much and what kinds of foods we eat.

Tell me a bit about the styles of cooking that you have found.

We find that the nutritional gatekeeper, what we call the person who purchases and prepares the food in their home, controls about 72% of all the food their family eats. They do it either positively or negatively: positively if they serve fruit bowls, negatively if they serve candy dishes.

We did a study of 1,004 North Americans. These were
good cooks
, people considered by themselves and by at least one of their family members to be a far above average cook. We asked probably about 120 questions of all different aspects. We found that about 80% to 85% could be categorized in one of five different ways.

The
giving cooks
are the people who see the food they make as giving love. They tend to be great bakers, very traditional in the recipes they make. There’s not a lot of changing or tweaking of the recipes. They’re the ones who all the families go to on Thanksgiving or Christmas.

The second one of these good cooks is the
healthy cook
. This shouldn’t be that surprising, but these are the people who will sacrifice taste to make something healthy. They eat lots of fish and tend to be most likely an exerciser of all these groups. They’re more likely than the others to have a garden as well.

The third group is the
methodical cook
. The methodical cook can pretty much make anything, but she or he has to have that cookbook right in front of them the entire time. After they finish making something, it’s going to look exactly like it looks in the cookbook. Their kitchen is going to look pretty much like Iwo Jima. They have some of the skills, but they don’t have the familiarity, the “second nature” of cooking that would make them facile in the kitchen.

The fourth group is an
innovative cook
. They cook by second nature. They seldom use cookbooks and if they do they just look at the picture and say, “Yeah, I can do that!” These people are pretty creative in a lot of other areas of their life, too. Cooking for them is almost like painting might be for an artist or messing around with music might be for a musician. It’s not just a hobby; it’s sort of an expressive release. Innovative cooks are interesting, because very little of their ego is involved in the food they make. If something goes wrong, they’re not going to be shattered and cry in the corner for the rest of the day. They’re just going to be like, “Eh, tried it and it didn’t work, no big deal.”

The fifth group of good cooks are also very fun. These are
competitive cooks
. They cook to impress other people. You can kind of consider them to be the Iron Chefs of the neighborhood.
They’ll try new things. They’ll try weird things, but not because they like new weird things; they want you to leave that night going, “That guy is incredible! Man, that was great!”

If you have two people who are in a relationship, I have to imagine there are combinations of style that lead to some amount of conflict, like a giving cook baking for someone trying to get fit. Do you have any advice for couples or families where the nutritional gatekeeper is doing something that’s antagonistic without knowing it?

In most people’s lives, about five meals per week can cause conflict. First, breakfasts are eaten at staggered times and since they’re kind of low-prep things, the person can do whatever they want to or skip it. Lunches are often eaten offsite and you can pack your own. The action is usually at dinner, but even with dinners, there could be a night or two where people might eat somewhere else, or a night or two when one of them is away. It leaves a very small handful of meals where there is potential conflict. That can be further reduced by having one night when the nondominant cook ends up doing the cooking for everyone else. So, for instance, on Mondays I usually cook for my family to give my wife a break.

What are the easiest habits that a geek can change to help them eat healthier?

This depends on what their issues are. One would be simply to use a smaller plate. A smaller plate leads you to eat 22% less than a larger plate. That only works with fresh food, because if all you’re doing is heating up frozen food, you’re going to eat all you can heat. Another one would be to serve off the counter. What we find is a person ends up being about two-sevenths as likely to go back for seconds or thirds or fourths if a dish is simply six or more feet away.

How much of those biases and those cues can we counteract by knowing about them? Do they tend to go away once we’re aware of them?

I took 60 graduate students and for 90 minutes told them that if I give them a big serving bowl of Chex Mix they will take and eat a lot more than if I give them a slightly smaller bowl. I demonstrated and showed videos. They broke into groups to figure out how they could let this not happen to them. Then I invited them to a big Super Bowl party. We had huge bowls of Chex Mix in one room and slightly smaller bowls of Chex Mix in the other. Those in the room with the big bowls ate about 200 more calories over the course of the night. When they were leaving, I asked “You ate about 50% more than the group in the other room. Do you think the size of the bowl had anything to do with it?” They said no. They would make random stuff up like, “I didn’t have breakfast last Tuesday!” Mindful eating might work for some people. For those of us who have 10 things going on, I don’t know how we could be much more mindful 21 times a week just for meals, let alone snacks.

We’ve got wives, we’ve got kids screaming, we’ve got lists that we’re making in our heads in the middle of dinner, we have four phone calls we need to make when we finish. We’re way too busy to do mindful eating, unless you live in a castle by yourself. So for most of us, the solution isn’t information; the solution is simply to change our environment so that it works for us. We find that if you give people short wide glasses rather than tall skinny glasses with the same volume, people end up pouring about 32% more into them. Even bartenders pouring a shot will pour more in a short wide glass than a tall skinny glass. They never look at the width of the glass; they just look at the height. You could say, “I must not over pour every time I have a short wide glass.” That’s ridiculous. We’re not going to do that. A better solution is just to get rid of all of your short wide glasses. Now that I’m aware that that could happen it’s not going to happen; of course it’s going to happen. Just change that cue.

Change the environment. That sounds like it’s the secret.

The first line of
Mindless Eating
says the best diet is the diet you don’t know you’re on. I actually started the last chapter by saying it’s easier to change your environment than to change your mind.