Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food (6 page)
Read Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food Online
Authors: Jeff Potter
Tags: #COOKING / Methods / General
Learn to
really
taste things. The mechanical aspects of cooking — combining ingredients, applying heat — come down to smell and taste. Pay attention to your sense of smell and see if you can notice a change in the odors just as the food finishes cooking. Take time to taste a dish and ask yourself what would make it better. And taste things throughout the process of cooking to see how the flavors evolve over time.
One of the first things I was taught in painting class was to be comfortable scraping the still-wet oil paint off the canvas. We were told to paint a still life; a few hours later, our instructor said, “Great, now take the palette knife and scrape the paint off. All of it.” Talk about frustration! But it’s a good lesson: becoming attached to the current state of something prevents you from being able to see better ways of doing it. In writing, it’s called “killing your babies”: deleting favorite bits of the text that no longer serve their original purpose. (These are usually pieces of text that are older and have survived rewrites due to emotional attachment.) “Killing your babies” is about getting beyond the current version, about getting from point
A
to a better point:
B
.
How does all this relate to cooking? Given a sauce, stew, cookie dough, whatever food you’re working with, its “current state” is
A
. If you taste it and think it’s not quite right, how do you get to
B
? Start with
A
, taste it, take a guess at what might make it better, and try version
B
. Turning out great food isn’t about following a recipe exactly and getting it right on the first pass; it’s about making many small guesses and picking the better choice with each guess.
Try making a guess with a small side portion if you’re unsure. Making stew? Put a few spoonfuls in a bowl and season that. Making cookies? Bake just one cookie, see how it comes out, and tweak the dough before making the next one.
It depends. In a standard U.S. cup, 237 ml. But if you’re talking about a U.S. “legal” cup, as used on nutrition labels, it’s 240 ml. Live in Canada, eh? That’ll be 250 ml, please. Or are we British? An imperial cup is 284 ml. This leaves me wondering: is a pint of Guinness actually larger in Ireland?
Randall Munroe of xkcd (
http://www.xkcd.com
) has kindly provided the following guide to converting to metric.
USED BY PERMISSION OF RANDALL MUNROE, XKCD.COM
P.S. Which weighs more: an ounce of gold or an ounce of feathers? (Hint: 31 grams in a troy ounce; 28 grams in a normal ounce.)
Sure, to be proficient at something you do need the technical skill to be able to see where you want to go and to understand how to get there. And happy accidents do happen. However, the methodical approach is to look at
A
, wonder if maybe
B
would be better, and rework it until you have
B
. (“Hmm, seems a bit dull, needs a bit more zing, how about some lemon juice?”) The real skill isn’t in getting to
B
, though: it’s in holding the memory of
A
in your head and judging whether
B
is actually an improvement. It’s an iterative process — taste, adjust, taste, adjust — with each loop either improving the dish or educating you about what guesses didn’t work out. Even the bad guesses are useful because they’ll help you build up a body of knowledge.
Taste the dish. It’s your feedback mechanism both for checking if
A
is “good enough” and for determining if
B
is better than
A
.
Talking with other geeks, I realized how lucky I was as a kid to have parents who both liked to cook and made time to sit down with us every day over a good home-cooked meal. Because of this background, approaching the kitchen has never been a big deal for me. But for some, the simple idea of stepping into the kitchen sets off panic attacks as the primitive parts of the brain take over (you can blame your brain’s
locus coeruleus
; it’s not your fault).
Here’s the thing. Failure in the kitchen — burning something, “wasting” money, and having to order pizza — is actually
success
. Think of it this way: there’s not much to learn when things work. When they fail, you have a chance to understand where the boundary conditions are and an opportunity to learn how to save something in the future when things go awry. Made mac ’n cheese from scratch but the sauce turned out gritty? Spend some time searching online and you’ll discover that gritty cheese sauce = “broken” sauce, which is caused by too much heat and stirring, or using nonfat cheese. The key to learning how to cook is to define success as a chance to learn rather than as a perfect meal. Even if dinner does end up in the trash, if you learned something about what went wrong, that’s success. Failure in the kitchen is a better instructor than success.
Fear of failure is another thoroughly modern American phenomenon. We’re bombarded with images of the perfect Thanksgiving turkey (they probably used a plastic one during the photo shoot), photos of models sporting impossible physiques (thanks, Photoshop), and stories of triumph and success (where they don’t disclose the sad parts and trade-offs). Then when we go to try something, we often find it doesn’t work for us the way it seems to for others. Setbacks. Negative feedback. No wonder there’s so much fear of failure: we’ve set ourselves a bar so high that it simply doesn’t exist.
There’s a generation of Americans hung up on being perfect. The perfect white teeth, the perfect clothing, the perfect “carefree” tossed-together wardrobe. Helicopter parents. Overly critical Yelp.com reviews that rag on everything, down to who cuts our hair and the food we eat. Insane expectations in reviews on Amazon.com about the books we read. (A good book is one that gives you more value than the cost of the book and your time. Be kind.;-) ) No wonder why some parts of American society seem to match the DSM-V criteria for schizophrenia: we’re literally going insane trying to be perfect when it just isn’t possible. It’s much easier to love yourself for who you are than to try to be perfect (the latter will never bring true happiness), and it’s much easier in the kitchen to aspire to “fun and tasty” than the
perfect
16-course gourmet meal (although attempting it can be fun on occasion).
Be okay with being “just” good enough. Part of the appeal of Julia Child was her almost-average abilities and her “nothing special” aura. The reason some people fear Martha Stewart is because her cooking looks perfect and always comes out perfectly on the first try. (I have the world of respect for Ms. Stewart.) Given her background — starting a catering business out of her basement — she had to be perfect to succeed. (Wedding days have to be perfect, no?) This quest for perfection comes at a real cost, though; even if it’s achievable for a day, it isn’t practical day-in, day-out.
Set reasonable goals, and expect to get frustrated on occasion. Cooking well takes practice. Play around with various ingredients and techniques, and come up with projects you want to try. (
Mmm, bacon and egg breakfast pizza
.) It’s like learning to play the guitar: at first you strive just to hit the notes and play the chords, and it takes time to gain command of the basic techniques and to move on to the level where subtle improvisation and nuanced expression can occur. If your dream is to play in a band, don’t expect to get up on stage after a day or even a month; start by picking up a basic book on learning to play the guitar and practicing somewhere you’re comfortable.
A beta tester for this book commented:
While there are chefs with natural-born abilities, people have to be aware that learning to cook is an iterative process. They have to learn to expect not to get it right the first time, and proceed from there, doing it again and again.
What about when you fubar (foobar?) a meal and can’t figure out why? Think of it like not solving a puzzle on the first try. When starting to cook, make sure you don’t pick puzzles that are too difficult. Start with simpler puzzles (recipes) that will allow you to gain the insights needed to solve the harder ones. And give it time. You might have days when you feel like you’ve learned nothing, but the cumulative result will lead to insights.
If a recipe doesn’t work as well as you’d have liked, try to figure out why and then try it again. It might also be the fault of the recipe, or that the recipe is simply too advanced. I know some newbies who have gotten stuck trying to perfect one dish. They usually burn
out in frustration. If you’re not happy with the results of your early attempts, try a different source of recipes. Some books, especially those from top-tier restaurateurs such as Chefs Thomas Keller or Grant Achatz, are highly technical and complicated. Don’t begin with these recipes; instead, pick recipes that limit the number of variables to just a handful that you can manage.
“A Kinder, Gentler Philosophy of Success”
Celebrity Chef Gordon Ramsay has carved out a niche as a raging culinary maniac. (Secretly, I bet he’s “tough but gentle on the inside,” and that the TV series
Hell’s Kitchen
has edited the footage to exaggerate his hot temper.) Getting results doesn’t have to be about fear and intimidation, though. There’s a great TED talk (TED is an annual conference loosely related to “Technology Education Design”) by Alain de Botton available online, called “A kinder, gentler philosophy of success”; see
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/alain_de_botton_a_kinder_gentler_philosophy_of_success.html
.
I hope by now I’ve convinced you that it’s okay to burn the meal, to read the entire recipe before starting, and that xkcd is awesome. (Maybe you already knew all these things...) You’re ready to venture into the kitchen and want to make your favorite dish. Where to start?
If you’re new to cooking, do what experienced programmers do when encountering a new language: look at a few different examples. Don’t just print out and follow the first recipe you find; that’d be like downloading a random executable and running it. Recipes should be treated as reference implementations, especially if you’re cooking a dish that you’ve never made before. Pull up a couple of examples, consider what the authors were doing, and ask yourself what makes their “code” (recipe) work and what parts of their “code” apply to what you want to do.
Let’s use pancakes as an example. They’re quick to make, and the ingredients are cheap, so if you want to try variations, you’re not risking financial meltdown. (One friend told me about learning to de-bone animals in culinary school. It basically amounted to “do it 100 times, and by the time you’re done, you’ll know how to do it.” That’s gotta add up.) Start by going online and searching for “pancake recipe.”
Here’s the thought process that runs through my head. I look at three or four different recipes, reading through at least the ingredient list. Of the recipes, usually one of them will be an outlier with odd instructions or require something I don’t have on hand — say, yogurt — or call for ingredients that I’m not in the mood for (nothing against peanut butter). Of the remaining few, I look at the ratio of ingredients and pick one that looks reasonable. Don’t worry if it turns out not to
be
reasonable; you’ll learn afterward that it wasn’t — that’s the point!
Then, it’s off to the kitchen. The first time I make something from a recipe, I try to follow it as precisely as I can, even if I think it should be altered. For pancakes, I might think the batter is too runny (add more flour) or thick (add more milk). Or maybe the batter looks fine, but it comes out too thin (add more baking powder for cakier pancakes). Regardless, on the first pass, I remain true to the recipe because sometimes it’ll surprise me. I love it when this happens; it means there’s something I don’t understand and it gives me a chance to correct my mental model of how things work.
If you really want to geek out, print out a handful of recipes and figure out the ratios between the ingredients in each recipe, and then look at the differences in the ratios between the recipes. Why would some ingredients remain at a relatively constant percentage of the recipe while others differ? Even if you can’t answer the
why
, you’ll have a huge clue as to what’s critical in the recipe. If buttermilk pancake recipes always call for baking soda, there’s probably a chemical reaction going on with the baking soda. Compare those recipes to nonbuttermilk ones. Besides leaving out the buttermilk, there’s no baking soda. From this, you can infer that the baking soda is reacting with the buttermilk. Sure enough, buttermilk has a pH of 4.4–4.8, while regular milk has a pH of ~6.7, so it follows that baking soda will buffer and neutralize the more acidic buttermilk. (See
Chemical Leaveners
in
Chapter 5
for more about the chemistry of baking soda.)
The following chart is the breakdown for eight pancake recipes that came up for me on an Internet search for “pancake recipes.”
No one’s ever wrong on the Internet, so the average of a whole bunch of right things must be righter, right? The quantities here are based on the average of the eight different pancake recipes from an online search. For each ingredient, I converted the measurement to grams and then calculated that ingredient’s percentage of the total weight of the recipe. (This is somewhat like a “baker’s percentage,” in which ingredients are given as a percentage of the weight of flour in a recipe.)
In a mixing bowl, measure out and whisk together:
- 1½ cups (190g) flour
- 2 tablespoons (25g) sugar
- 2 teaspoons (10g) baking powder
- ½ teaspoon (3g) salt
In a separate, microwave-safe bowl, melt:
- 2 tablespoons (25g) butter
By default, assume that the order of ingredients in a recipe indicates the order in which you should add the ingredients into your bowl. It doesn’t always matter, of course, but in this case you should add the milk before the eggs to prevent the eggs from cooking in the hot butter.
Add to the butter and whisk to combine thoroughly:
- 1¼ cups (330g) milk
- 2 small or 1 extra-large (80g) eggs
Pour the dry ingredients into the liquid ingredients and mix them together with a whisk or spoon until just incorporated. Little pockets of flour are okay; you want to avoid overstirring the batter to minimize the amount of gluten formed from two proteins, glutenin and gliadin, present in flour (they crosslink and bond together to create a stretchy, net-like matrix — think French bread).
Place a nonstick frying pan on a burner set to medium-high. Wait until the pan is hot. The standard test is to toss a few drops of water into the pan and see if they sizzle; the geek test is to take an IR thermometer and check that the pan is around 400°F / 200°C. Use a ladle, measuring cup, or ice cream scoop to pour about half a cup of batter into the pan. As the first side cooks, you’ll see bubbles forming on the top surface of the pancake. Flip the pancake after those bubbles have started to form, but before they pop (about two minutes).
Wolfram|Alpha (
http://www.wolframalpha.com
) is a great resource for converting standard measurements to metric. Enter 1T sugar and it’ll tell you 13g; enter the entire Eigen Pancake recipe — use “+” between individual ingredients — and it’ll tell you 38 grams of fat, 189 grams of carbs, and 46 grams of protein.
Pancakes are a great way to teach cooking to kids. This is the first recipe my parents taught me.
Notes
- If you use a nonstick frying pan, you don’t need to butter the pan first. If you’re using a regular sauté pan, butter it and then wipe out as much of the butter as you can with a paper towel. Too much butter on the surface of the pan will prevent parts of the pancake from reaching temperatures hot enough for browning reactions, as you can see here in the pancake on the left.
- When a recipe calls for an egg, what size should you use? By default, use large eggs, unless you’re in the EU, in which case use medium eggs. (Fun egg trivia: quail eggs weigh about 9 grams on average, while duck eggs weigh around 70 grams. I was happy to learn that ducks themselves also weigh about 8 times more than quails.)
NoteUsing a scale with gram weights? Hit the “tare” button after adding each ingredient.
- Cracking an egg? Tap it on the counter, not the edge of a bowl. The shell of an egg cracked on a flat surface will have larger pieces that aren’t pushed into the egg. Eggs cracked on a sharp lip are much more likely to have little shards of shell poked into them that then end up in the bowl and have to be fetched out.
Egg cracked on edge of bowl.
Egg cracked on flat surface.