A food’s texture is central to its ability to captivate and to please. We value pureed and/or creamy foods as “comfort” foods, and crunchiness and crispiness as “fun” foods. We enjoy texture as it activates our other senses, including touch, sight, and sound.
While babies by necessity eat pureed foods, most adults enjoy a variety of textures, particularly crispiness and crunchiness, which break up the smoothness of texture — or even the simple monotony — of dishes.
People want to say that wine is natural and has been around for a thousand years. But is it natural or unnatural? We don’t know. You have people in a foreign country stepping all over these grapes, putting foot fungus in there, and then creating a fermented thing that is controlled. I don’t think that wine is all that natural! Every time you turn on the blender and puree something, you are crossing the line of natural versus unnatural. Nature did not intend for an electronic motor to spin a blade and turn a solid into a liquid.
I disagree with the notion that there are no new flavors. Maybe there are no new products, even though we don’t know everything that exists in the sea. To create a new flavor, all you have to do is dissect an ingredient. For example, if I take an avocado and put it into a centrifuge, we would separate the fat and the water. The water will carry the avocado taste. If I take that water and create a snow with it or make it into a pill, it will have a much different taste than avocado, because avocado is thought of as something that is rich. But there would be no richness here; it is a completely different product. We just made up a new flavor.
How to lengthen flavors
Think of something in its pure form like passion fruit puree: It is strong, vibrant, and when it touches your tongue, you taste it all at once. I learned from Blumethal (chef of The Fat Duck) that if you take that same passion fruit and make it into a gelee and cube it, then you will get the flavor little by little as the cube melts on your palate. The flavor release takes longer and last longer in your mouth.
My cooking philosophy has always been simple: Don’t complicate things, and let the food speak for itself. I want the food to leave a clean taste in your mouth, and that goes for savory food as well as desserts.
I tell cooks, “When in doubt, don’t use it.” The food you are starting with already has its own intrinsic flavor, whether it is a scallop or a filet of beef. Whatever you do to embellish the flavor should be a very minor part of the relationship, rather than sharing the stage fifty-fifty.
You should always season something right from the start, and not just at the end. If you just add salt and pepper at the end, you are not doing the soup justice. You want those flavors to blossom.
When I come up with a new dish, I am looking at two things: The first is building up the richness, and the second is cutting that richness with acidity, spice, or herbaceousness.
I start by thinking, What is the rich component? How can I build richness? If it is a protein, we may cure the meat or fry the fish. If it is a vegetarian dish, I may start with eggplant, which is meaty, so I will build it up with miso or tahini, which will make it even richer and meatier. This is really important in a vegetarian dish, because I hate those flimsy veg plates of grilled vegetable and a lot of salad!
Texture is another way of building richness. If you add miso or tahini, that adds richness and texture. An emulsification also gives a sense of richness in your mind and across your palate. One way to add rich texture is a “fakey-jakey” way is to add palm sugar. It is a less sweet sugar, and we will shave it into a dish halfway through the cooking and temper it with tamarind. We use it so subtly that you don’t even know it is there.
Now that I have my richness, the question becomes, “How can we cut that richness so it is light on the palate and in the belly?” We use a tremendous amount of acid, but it is always in check with what is on the plate. Choosing the right acid or herb will leave a light feeling on the palate and cut a rich dish.
With any fried food, you need a big zap of acidity to get through it. With fried fish, we will use preserved lemon, yogurt, or yuzu with a white soy dipping sauce.
Proteins
- Light: fish, shellfish, tofu
- Medium: white meat (chicken, pork, veal)
- Heavy: red meat (beef, lamb, venison)
Cooking Techniques
- Light: poaching, steaming
- Medium: frying, sauteing
- Heavy: braising, stewing
Herbs
- Light: chervil, parsley
- Medium: dill, lemon thyme
- Heavy: rosemary, tarragon
Different tastes serve different functions.
Saltiness stimulates thirst (think of all those free salty peanut in bars), while sourness quenches it (think lemonade). Saltiness heightens the appetite, making this flavor especially effective in appetizers. Bitterness also stimulates the appetite, and can promote the other tastes with which it is paired while adding a note of lightness to a dish. Sourness is refreshing, and adds a fresh note to any dish to which it is added. Sweetness is famously satiating, making it ideal (not to mention customary) to end a meal with a sweet dessert, or at least a sweet note (such as a cheese course with honey or sweet fig).
Certain foods, such as the spices cinnamon and nutmeg, are thought of as “warming” foods, so their addition to dishes is thought to add a warming quality that might be especially welcomed on a cold day. There are also “cooling” foods (such as cucumber and mint) that can be used just as judiciously.
Determining the region that will serve as the reference point for whatever you’re cooking is one of the easiest ways to create a successful flavor marriages in the kitchen. Thinking regionally is as important to good pairing as thinking seasonally is to good cooking. Many people are familiar with the maxim “If it grows together, it goes together,” and this is still the best place to start as a guide.
Fast-twitch fibers: short bursts of activity. Lighter.
Slow-twitch fibers: greater endurance. Darker.
What causes some meat to appear red and some to look white? Contrary to what many people think, the difference in color has nothing to do with blood. There’s not much blood in a muscle to begin with, and in any case, at slaughter, all of the animal’s blood is drained.
When you bite into a cut of meat, you immediately rupture the muscle tissue, flooding your mouth with juice and fat. More marbling produces more fat, helping to enhance the first impression of how juicy a piece of meat is.
As you keep chewing, the initial burst of juiciness is swallowed. The sense you get of sustained juiciness — what cooks often describe as succulence — arises as the released fats mix with the moist gelatin produced from cooked collagen and keep the meat fibers lubricated.
After cooking, a prime-grade steak still contains a lot of fat and some gelatin, whereas even expertly prepared veal, because it comes from such a young animal, offers little of either. As a result, a mouthful of veal may be very juicy at first, but it lacks the succulence you experience from a prime-grade steak.
The fat’s function is to store energy in a very compact form for long periods of time. The price the animal pays for stashing away energy so densely is that it can recover the energy in the fat only slowly. Thus, you will not find a lot of fat in muscles that need a lot of energy in a hurry. Such muscles are dominated by lighter muscle fibers that yield pale-colored meat.
Endurance muscles need a prolonged supply of energy and a lot of dark, slow-twitch fibers that are geared to steadily burn fat. Such muscles will typically contain more fat.
Abalones are like scallops in that you normally eat just their foot muscle and discard the entrails. Abalones are unlike scallops in that they have only a single shell and a very strong foot that lets them cling to seaweed, coral, and rocks. Because of an abundance of connective tissue present in the foot, abalones are best sliced very thinly and eaten raw or rare. With minimal cooking, their texture becomes chewy and a bit crunchy, but at higher cooking temperatures, their collagen shrinks and makes them very tough. Only very prolonged cooking soften them enough to be enjoyable again.
Oysters and mussels are a different story. They have a foot for anchoring, but it’s too small and tough to be enticing. These mollusks are worth eating for their entrails, which are slick and tender.
Clams are similar to oysters and mussels; the fundamental difference is that clams have an organ known as a siphon. A clam uses its foot to bury itself completely, extending its siphon out of the sand to obtain the water it filters for food. In general, you eat all parts of clams because they are so small.
In general, the saltier the water they are taken from, the more savory the shellfish.
Raw meat is soft but you wouldn’t call it tender. Indeed, if you watch lions eating raw meat, it is striking how difficult it is for them to chew through it, despite their sharp teeth and powerful jaw muscles. That is why steak tartare and carpaccio are served chopped or sliced: the cutting does most of the hard work for us.
Muscle and meat are roughly analogous to man-made composites like reinforced concrete, fiberglass, or carbon-fiber composites. Concrete is strong in compression (that is, pushing together), but weak in tension (pulling apart). Embedding steel reinforcing bar, which has great tensile strength, makes concrete strong enough to use for myriad building purposes. Similarly, plastic resin by itself is not very resilient, but the addition of fibers made of glass or carbon makes it very strong.
Intuition might suggest that when you throw a cold steak into a hot skillet, the heat will flow evenly and steadily from the pan through the meat and into the air, warming the food gradually until it cooked all the way through. But that isn’t what happens at all. Instead, the surface of the steak cooks unevenly and much faster than the interior does. For cuts of beef thicker than 2cm, the upper surface will remain rare even after the steak has been frying for an hour on one side.
The main reason for this counterintuitive behavior is that meat is mostly water, and water absorbs a tremendous amount of heat energy as it boils into steam. The steam then both cools the pan as it condenses and insulates much of the meat from the heat. As a result, the temperature inside the steak falls off steeply with increasing distance from the pan, and the decrease follows a steep curve with three plateaus, rather than a simple straight line.
Just like the ions from salt in brines and cures, hydrogen ions from an acidic marinade diffuse through flesh slowly. Acidity can mimic the action of salt in another way as well: taken too far, it can chemically alter (denature) the proteins so much that the flesh takes on a cooked texture.
If a ceviche-style preparation is what you’re after, then protein denaturation is a good thing; otherwise, it can be undesirable.
One benefit that distinguishes an acidic marinade from a salty brine is that, unlike salt, acids are capable of weakening collagen fibers in the connective tissue that surrounds both muscle and fibers and bundles of muscle fibers, a process that also occurs during cooking. By weakening this connective tissue, the marinade not only tenderizes a tough cut of meat but also frees the muscle fibers in it to swell further, and they draw in more liquid as they do. The meat ends up both juicier and more tender.
A strong acid like lime juice can be used to “cook” fish without heat. Although the marinated fish may look cooked, however, its taste, texture, and food safety aspects are not the same.
The scale used to measure the acidity or alkalinity (also known as basicity) of a solution is called pH. Acids work by donating extra hydrogen ions to a solution. Alkaline substances (called bases or alkalies) in a solution scavenge and suck up hydrogen ions. The pH is a measure of the concentration of hydrogen ions dissolved in water on a logarithmic scale that runs from 0 to 14.
Bacteria, yeasts, and molds have been “processing” plant and animal matter since well before our species ever appeared to harness them.
When microbes ferment meat, they convert carbohydrates — including complex carbohydrates like starch and simple sugars like glucose — into acids and alcohol. Brewers, vintners, and distillers prefer yeasts that produce more alcohol than acid, but when you’re making a marinade, the most useful microorganisms are bacteria that mostly produce sour-tasting lactic acid.
In a sense, fermentation in this way is marinating with bacteria. The acid produced by the microbes has all the desirable effects on the juiciness and tenderness of the food as any other acid. But the beneficial bacteria have an additional, preservative function because they outcompete the harmful or distasteful varieties of bacteria associated with spoilage. The very lactic acid that the beneficial microbes secrete poisons the soup for neighboring, and potentially harmful, bacterial. In an era before reliable refrigeration was widely available, this clever use of bacteria to preserve the freshness of meats and seafood was invaluable.
Due to food spoilage, one-third of the world’s food produced for the consumption of humans is lost every year. Bacteria and various fungi are the cause of spoilage and can create serious consequences for the consumers, but there are preventative measures that can be taken.
Plants are made of gas! Just two things contribute to a plant’s weight. A huge fraction is water drawn up by the roots of the plant. Most of a plant’s dry matter comes from the air, more specifically from carbon dioxide absorbed by the leaves. Fertilizer companies’ claims that plants need rich nutrients from soil are true but misleading. Soil nutrients are like vitamins – necessary for good healthy but only a very small contributor to plant mass. No more than a tiny percentage of the dry weight of a plant comes from the soil. By mass, a plants is primarily carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen.
Many “traditional” plant foods aren’t traditional at all. Wheat developed in the Fertile Crescent before spreading across the globe. Polenta is not Italian but South American — as are tomatoes. Imagine Chinese food without chili peppers, which originated from South America.
Advocates of raw foods argue that plant foods are nutritionally superior before they are cooked. The human digestive system, however, isn’t adequately equipped to draw sufficient nutrition from an all-raw diet. Animal guts do a much better job.
Ruminants, the animal family that includes cows, get enough food value from grasses, which are nearly entirely made up of cell walls toughened by cellulose. Their meals are processed multiple times through a four-chambered stomach, they enlist microorganisms to ferment the cellulose, and they can regurgitate food and rechew it to further break it down.
Elephants deal with the relative low nutrient value of raw plants by eating as much as 180kg of food per day. Their bodies can make use of only a fraction of the plant matter, but the quantity makes up for the lack of quality.
A more efficient strategy is to seek raw foods that have higher nutrient values. Many small plant-eating animals feed on nuts, seeds, and fruits, thus ingesting large doses of calories and nutrients in relatively small packages.
We can be distinguished from animals by our ability to cook food. Cooking isn’t a human invention but rather is what actually drove our evolution from early hominids to Homo sapiens. Although it’s labor intensive, cooking food makes it easier to extract nutrients from the food. Every ounce of effort we spend preparing cooked food is paid back with food-derived energy to support the development of our fuel-hogging, oversized brains.
Although advocates of eating raw food claim that their approach is more natural than consuming cooked food, human lack the jaw muscles and large molars of the other great apes, so we have a hard time masticating raw vegetables adequately.
Fortunately, we have something gorillas do not: blenders and juicers. When raw food and health food advocates prepare smoothies, juices, and other blended foods, they do with spinning blades what gorillas do with gnashing teeth. The blender smashes tough cell walls. Juicers go one better and remove most of the hard-to-digest vegetable pulp.
Broadly speaking, there are two: naked and coated frying. Naked means that we put the food directly into the hot oil. Foods that have a high starch content, such as potatoes, respond well to this approach.
The other main approach to frying is to coat food in a starchy batter or breading. This coating is the only part of the food that actually exposed to the oil during deep-frying. Under the coating, the food poaches and steams in its own juices while the starch coating fries. Thus, when we make a batch of fried chicken or tempura shrimp, we are frying only the batter — we’re actually steaming the chicken or shrimp.
Food preservation was once a life-or-death necessity for surviving winter and other tough times.
Fruit evolved to be eaten more or less immediately, not to sit in fruit bowls.
The natural shelf life of vegetables is similarly limited. The moment a vegetable is picked, it starts to become more vulnerable to spoiling agents, including bacteria, mildew, and mold and other fungi. Vegetables that escape these external threats still decay, as natural enzymes in the plant tissue cause destruction from within. Refrigeration forestalls this effect, but more powerful means are needed to stop damaging enzymes and to inhibit the growth of harmful microbes. The most common approach to preservation is to deprive the microbes of the water they need to thrive, either by dehydrating the food (with heat or a vacuum) or by adding salt or sugar, which takes water away from microbes by chemical means.
A second easy way to hinder bacterial growth is to lower the pH of the water in the food by adding vinegar (acetic acid) or some other acid. This is the essence of pickling.
A third, less intuitive, option is to encourage the growth of certain desirable bacteria in food. They can outcompete spoilage-causing microbes and, by secreting acid and other compounds, suppress the growth of pathogenic microbes. That’s what happens in fermentation.
Most other methods of preserving, such as smoking and freeze-drying, work by either removing water or adding compounds that directly suppress bacterial growth, or by some combination of both.
Canning and freezing are two methods of preservation that do not work this way. Canning involves sterilizing food so that all enzymatic activity and bacterial growth is forever halted. Freezing doesn’t eliminate enzymes or bacteria. Instead, it effectively halts their activity to prevent spoilage. Finally, heat-shocking is a relatively new technique that greatly extends the life of fresh produce, without changing the appearance, texture, or flavor of that produce.
Exposing food to high levels of salt or sugar is essentially a method of “drying” food in liquid. It employs a chemical process known as osmosis, which works to balance the concentration of dissolved ions or molecules in liquids on either side of a semipermeable membrane. If the concentration is higher on one side than the other, liquid moves by osmosis to the side with a greater concentration of dissolved salt or sugar until the two sides reach equilibrium.
So when you place fruits or vegetables in water and add a sufficient amount of salt or sugar, water actually comes out of the plant cells rather than soaking into them. Think of it as the plant tissue’s trying to dilute the external liquid using the water sequestered in its own cells.
Yeasts make alcohol as they feed on sugar, and then acetobacters consume the alcohol and excrete acetic acid that is strong enough to kill other bacteria. The acetic acid is the key ingredient in vinegar.
Alcohol is noxious to a broad spectrum of microbes. Indeed, that’s why yeasts secrete it: to poison other microorganisms that might eat the sugars that the yeast thrives on. This strategy succeeds well for yeast — unless the alcohol-eating, vinegar-making acetobacters are present.
Wine is a type of preserved plant food, too: grape juice that is preserved by alcoholic fermentation.
Traditional methods use the sun or low oven temperatures to drive evaporation. The reason the warm air doesn’t cook the food is that the evaporation of the water cools the food far below the air temperature until the food is nearly dry.
When you mix together a batch of pasta, you may think of the result as a dough, but as with bread, you’re actually making a gel. Pasta is a specialized starch- and protein-bound gel, one made from grain flours that the cook wets, kneads to work the proteins together, and then presses into various shapes.
Hard as it is to imagine a world without pasta, the ancient Rome had none. They ate grain pastes, which were panfried in fat and added to stews or other dishes. These fried pastes were much more like fritters or falafel than true noodles or pasta.
Pasta requires flour with the correct mixture of starch and proteins. In some pastas, egg yolks supplement the flour protein to serve as a further binder. The flour is kneaded into a stiff dough. Moisture content is important: if the mixture is too sticky, it will be difficult to craft into pasta. If it is too dry, it will not bind cohesively.
So is Montrachet the best place in the world to grow the Chardonnay grape and make a stunning white wine? Or is it simply the best place within a few miles of a river? Trial, error, and historical contingencies over more than 2,000 years of French winemaking have identified a few special places like Montrachet. But we have to believe that many other ideal grape-growing areas exist, and many of them are probably not near any navigable body of water.
With plants, farmers have more control, before grafting and asexual propagation allow them to select a single genetic example, and then clone it. Most varieties of fruit are propagated by cloning. Most varieties of fruit are propagated by cloning. Recent successes with the cloning of animals in laboratories make us think of cloning as a high-tech process of molecular biology, like that which produced the famous cloned sheep, Dolly. Animal cloning is a high-tech process, which is still too difficult and costly to be used for agriculture. But plant cloning is easy. With many perennial plants, if you cut off a shoot and stick the end in the ground, it will likely grow roots. These days, you dip the cutting in root-stimulation hormone first to increase your chances of success.
Grafting is even easier: you cut off a branch from a plant, wedge it into notches made in a different plant, and then tape it up. Often the host plant is simply cut off at some point a bit above the ground so that only the roots are left; this is the rootstock. The roots of one plant thus support the top of another. It hardly seems fair to make a set of roots labor to bring water and nutrients up to an unrelated plant stuck on top of it, but such is the case with grafting. It works so easily because plants lack the complicated immune systems that animals have.
A seedless fruit is the crowing glory of propagation by grafting; it is unable to reproduce except with human help.
Many of the varietal grapes used in winemaking today originated in rare cases like this, in which normal sexual reproduction via pollination was allowed to occur — either as crossbreeding of two cultivars or within the same one. Once such a success occurred, a vintner noticed it and propagated the result via grafting.
You might think this means that all Chardonnay grapes are identical. If they are all related to one mother vine, which has been grafted and cloned, then they should all be the same. That’s almost true. Mutations do occur in the vines themselves, so a given branch (called a cane) might have slightly different genes from other canes on the same plant.
Mutations of this kind are usually subtle, with much less variation than you’d get from pollination, but the results can still be important.
One of the amazing things about the wine business is that producers have managed to turn unpredictability into something the customer accepts, even embraces. We all know that some vintage years are much better than others, and wine drinkers accept this as part of the mystery of wine. For the consumer, this often leads to a dilemma: what to choose from a wine list. It’s hard to recall which vintage means what, especially if you want to keep track of how good specific wines are over the years.
Why such variations in quality? It’s simple: the weather. Grapes are a temperamental product of nature, seriously affected by the temperature, precipitation, wind velocity, and cloud type that, over years, define a climate.
If you take a diverse set of red and white wines with a variety of flavor profiles, however, you’re in for a challenge.
The more training they have, the more mistakes they make because they are influenced by the color of the wine.
People are often shocked to hear that red and white wines are difficult to distinguish by taste and smell alone, or that visual cues influence the perception of flavor.
It’s almost too easy to make fun of the stilted, often flowery language used to describe the flavors and aromas of wine: it’s quite a lexicon, encompassing everything from “blackberry jam” to “wet dog.” Here’s an experiment to try: take any food you like — a strawberry, a piece of steak, a carrot. Taste it, then try to describe its flavors without using its name. Not so easy, is it?
Humans are visual storytellers; we have a great deal of language at our disposal to describe what we see — but not what we taste.
The most extreme descriptions seem designed to be more evocative than literal. But is that really useful? Or is it more like poetry, which is meant to evoke emotions rather than have a functional utility?
As children, we were taught that there are four basic tastes: sweet, salty, bitter, and sour. Each is perceived by specialized taste buds in a different region of the tongue — bitterness in the back, for example, and sweetness on the tip. Flavor is a simple combination of taste and smell.
Now we know that this cartoon-like picture is not just wildly oversimplified but just flat wrong. More recent neuroscientific research reveals that flavor is arguably the most complex human sensory experience. A nearly infinite number of possible flavors can delight the palate. Cooking presents many things to worry about, but a shortage of room for innovation is not one of them!
Culinary professionals generally cooked quite differently from the mothers and grandmothers who were cooking only for themselves and their families. Baking leavened bread, for example, was largely a professional activity, because ovens were expensive to own and operate. It took a lot of fuel to heat the earth, clay, or brick interior of an oven, and once you did, it would be wasteful to cook only one loaf of bread. Anyone who could afford to own and operate a large oven was either a professional or someone who could afford to employ one. Most people couldn’t, so they bought or bartered for their bread.
In early civilizations, wealth was synonymous with political or religious power, so the primary employers of professional chefs were kings, aristocrats, or priests. Much the same phenomenon occurred in the arts. Painters produced commissioned works for the kings or the high priests; jewelers made the king’s crown and the queen’s jewels; architects designed the palace and temples.
This divide between professional chefs cooking for the wealthy and peasants cooking for themselves drove the development of many cuisines. Each side influenced the other. Professional chefs sought to do things differently than the masses, to create a distinct culinary experience for their elite clientele. Common people sought to adopt some of the finer things in life by copying the dishes served at royal tables.
From a culinary perspective, Roman is not the same as Italian. Virtually none of the dishes mentioned in Apicius are recognizable as the Italian cooking we know today.
There is a large and vocal school of thought in the world of food and gastronomy that celebrates tradition. People who advocate this point of view seek out the authentic and original aspects of cuisine, placing in high esteem food experiences that conform to traditional styles and values. This group’s motto might be, “Old ways are best.” People in this camp are generally more interested in a recipe from Grandma’s farmhouse than they are in a contemporary chef’s latest creations.
This view is possible, however, only if you shut your eyes to history. What we call “traditional” cuisine is a convenient fiction. Culinary practices have been a changing constantly throughout history. Investigate a “traditional” food closely enough, and you’ll find that it was new at some point, perhaps not even all that long ago. Tradition, at least in the food world, is the accumulated leftovers from changes wrought in the past.
A lot of progress has been made in our scientific knowledge of what is good and bad for us, which is another reason to question the great-grandmother rule. Would you really want to be treated by your great-grandmother’s doctor than by a physician today?
The critic’s goal was to ridicule the movement, but the young artists accepted the name and moved forward undaunted. Ultimately, the Impressionists won. Public perception changed, and what was previously considered ugly or unfinished came to be viewed as beautiful and artistic.
Today, Impressionism is probably the most popular artistic style. People who like modern art regard the Impressionists as the progenitors of the modern movement. And those with more classical tastes still find the paintings beautiful. Impressionism is the ideal crossover genre, beloved by people who still feel a lingering desire for representational and realistic art as well as by those who buy into a more abstract agenda.
The greatest legacy of the Impressionists is that they were among the first to establish the model of artists rebelling against the system.
We have become so used to this pattern that it is almost viewed as a job requirement: young artists are expected to be part of an avant-garde. They either join the movement du jour or conspire to create a new one. It would seem very strange, at least within popular perception, for young artists to be willing conformists to the existing order.
There is plenty of truth in these claims; the rise of prepared food and fast food did lead to many negative changes. But we must also recognize the forces at work. People want food quickly and cheaply. They prefer national brands they feel they can trust. Manufacturing on a large scale allows prices to be low, which further stimulates sales. This combination of factors virtually guarantees that large companies will grow to fill the need.
When one decries the evils of fast food and manufactured food, an important question to ask is “Compared to what?” It would be wonderful if everyone could afford to sit down to traditionally cooked meal, but that simply isn’t practical for many people. And what may be hard for a food critic, foodie, or chef to understand is that some people don’t even want a home-cooked meal. The fast food and convenience food industries exist because people have voted with their pocketbooks and their stomachs. It is both unrealistic and elitist not to recognize this. Although it would be great to offer the world better food choices, society has collectively chosen the course we are on today.
While other chefs might work to optimize the purely gastronomic qualities of their food, such as taste and texture, Adria had a higher goal. Did the food make people think, make them react emotionally? How did it change the dialogue?
That is the whole point of patent law: in return for filing a patent that discloses the secret of how to do something, you get two decades of exclusive access to the technique. After that, the idea becomes fair game for anyone who wants to use it.
Chefs don’t usually aspire to write a book that is more comprehensive than their own vision — after all, a chef operating a restaurant probably doesn’t have the time to produce a lengthy reference text like those that exist for French cuisine. Chefs are too busy running their kitchens and creating new dishes.
In a sense, cookbook writers face similar barriers. Many of the greatest cookbooks are written by people who write for a living. Authors such as these tend not to write large-scale reference books, which require large staffs working full-time for a matter of years. For context, consider that the production of these five volumes required the combined efforts of several dozen people over the span of three years. That level of effort is the norm for a major reference work or college textbook. Resources on this scale are generally not available to independent food writers, however.
Who, then, would spend the time, energy, and money to create a large-scale culinary reference book? Certainly not mainstream publishers because such a book would be extremely expensive to produce and would not have any proven market. Who would be foolhardy enough to step forward? We decided it would be us.
What I would up with was what you see now, a multivolume book with three main goals: to explain key aspects of food science in a new way; to show how traditional cooking really works; and to provide detailed, step-by-step photos and instructions for every major technique and ingredient in Modernist cooking. A saner man might have treated that as three distinct projects, but to me they seem to hang together as a unit.
Indeed, a chef friend asked me, “Do you really need all that material in there?” My answer was to throw the question back at him: “Tell me, do you really need that many courses on your tasting menu?” The point is, what does need have to do with any of this? High-end cooking is about delighting both the chef and the diner; it’s not about delivering the minimum daily requirements of nutrition. Similarly, books like these are meant to provide far more than than the basics of culinary technique.
It is therefore not much of an exaggeration, if any, to say that just two basic rules would prevent 99% of foodborne illnesses:
- Do not consume the feces, vomit, or spittle of other humans
- Do not consume the feces, vomit, or spittle of animals
Foodborne pathogens typically reach their optimal reproductive rate between 37C and 43C. Most pathogens cannot grow above 55C.
Bacteria are tiny living things. Viruses are quite different, so much so that they blur the distinction between what is alive and what is just a complex chemical.
Viruses differ from bacteria in many fundamental ways that matter to food safety. Unlike bacteria, which can increase their numbers dramatically on or in food — even precooked food — viruses can reproduce only within the cells of living hosts. So viral contamination levels, at worst, remain constant in prepared food or ingredients; the contamination does not increase over time.
Even though viruses do not reproduce independently the way that bacteria do, they do reproduce in a parasitic way, so they are subject to natural selection. They co-evolve with their host species, and over time, become quite specialized. Although most viruses infect just a single species, some adapt and cross over to infect other species.
Unlike bacteria, which sometimes benefit humans, no natural human viruses are known to be beneficial.
Perhaps the most important way in which viruses differ from bacteria is how they die. Because viruses aren’t alive in the same way that bacteria are, you can’t kill them: instead, you must inactivate viral pathogens.
Of all the miracle curs and preventive wonders medical science has wrought, none can match hygiene.
Yet the uncomfortable fact remains that, even in the developed countries of the world, we live surrounded by contamination, much of it fecal contamination. “We’re basically bathed in feces as a society.”
It’s not that cooks don’t understand the necessity of hand washing. Most just don’t realize how thorough they must be to do it right. People almost always miss their thumbs when they wash their hands, for instance, and they rarely wash long enough to achieve the desired effect.
Fats and oils are type of lipids. They are composed of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Fats contain more than twice as much energy as do proteins and carbohydrates. Fauna and flora alike use fat for energy storage precisely because its is so space-efficient. To put it in technological terms, food-based fats have an energy density quite similar to that of gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel.
All of us know they relate to energy or power, but we may be a bit unclear about the difference between the two or about which units refer to energy and which to power. That’s not surprising given that some conventions for using these units seem to have been established purposefully to mislead.
So to clear up confusion at the outset, on one hand we have energy, a pure quantity untouched by time. Power, on the other hand, is a rate of change in energy: an amount of energy per unit of time.
The fraction of the input power that a device converts to useful heat and mechanical work is known as its efficiency. Automobile engines are typically just 25% efficient, but small electric motors such as the pump in a water bath or the motor in a blender can have efficiencies as high as 60%. A pot sitting above the gas burner of a stove is not nearly so efficient at transferring power into the food it contains. The heat you feel when standing next to the stove comes from thermal energy that has escaped without doing its job.
Induction burners are far more efficient than gas burners or all other electric heating elements because they heat only the pots and pans placed on them, not the surrounding air or intervening surfaces.
In any given cooking method, four modes of heat transfer operate independently and often simultaneously. But one mode is almost always dominant.
The most common mode is conduction, which is how most heat flows within solids and between solid materials in contact. Conduction carries heat from an electric burner coil through a skillet and into a strip of bacon, for example. A second mode, called convection, dominates in fluids such as boiling water, deep-frying oil, and the hot air of a baking oven. A third form of heat transfer, radiation, consists of waves of pure energy, like sunlight. Microwave oven, broilers, and charcoal grills all work mainly by using radiant heat. Finally, the condensation of water vapor onto a cooler surface, such as a snow pea, inject heat into the food. That process of phase change comes into play strongly during steaming.
Conduction is heat transfer by direct contact; particles bumping into and vibrating against one another exchange energy and allow it to spread through a solid or from one object to anther it is touching.
Conduction doesn’t happen at a distance. You can hold your hand just above a hot electric burner for a second or more and pull it away without getting burned. Touch the burner, however, and you’ll feel conduction at work right away!
Convection in liquid moves heat much more efficiently than convection in air does because the density of water or other cooking liquids is a thousand times higher than that of air. Far higher density translates into far more collisions between hot molecules and food. That’s why you can reach your hand into an oven without burning it, but if you stick your hand in a pot of boiling water you’ll get scalded — even though the oven may be more than twice as hot as the water.
Our foods are mostly water. We don’t think of them that way, but in the context of cooking, we should. You can think of fresh food as being composed of water plus “impurity” called proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and micronutrients such as minerals and vitamins. So it’s not surprising that the properties of water can dominate the way food responds to cooking.
Pound for pound, salt causes more freezing point depression than sugar does — by more than a factor of ten. The principal reason that ice cream doesn’t freeze as solid as a block of ice is that it contains a lot of dissolved sugar.
Unfortunately, the worst method is also the one most commonly used! Even putting food into a proper ultralow-temperature freezer at -80C is not a very good way to freeze food. The general rule is that a freezer is for holding food, not for freezing food. You should always free food before you put it in a freezer.
There are three good ways to freeze food: use a blast chiller/freezer; create an ice brine; use liquid nitrogen or dry ice.
Freezing thick goods is generally not a good idea. But if you must use thick frozen foods, then it is probably better to thaw them before cooking them. Thawing is best accomplished in cold water in the refrigerator.
Boiling is evaporation that happens at the hot bottom of the fluid rather than at the cooler surface.
People normally think of stale bread as dried out because they are accustomed to dried foods becoming harder. But in fact, the bread has absorbed moisture from the air. The crust absorbs water and loses its crispness, whereas water absorbed by the bread inside makes its starch granule crystallize, thus hardening it.
You can reverse staling damage by heading the bread in an oven for a few minute. Heat both melts the starch crystals and drives the water out.
Pure water is an excellent solvent — indeed, it’s sometimes called the universal solvent, because it dissolves more substances than any other liquid, including strong acids.
Because water dissolves things so well, it’s often full of minerals collected from its surrounding. Hard water is the term for water containing large quantities of dissolved minerals.