A recipe might tell you how to produce the dish in question, but it won’t teach you anything. Not how to cook, not really. Truth be told, recipes are infantilizing: Just do exactly what I say, but don’t ask questions or worry your little head about why. They insist on fidelity and faith, but do nothing to earn or explain it.
Think how much more we learn — and retain — when a teacher doesn’t just enumerate the step-by-step instructions but explains the principles behind them. Armed with reasons, we no longer have to cling to a recipe like a lifeboat; now we can strike out on our own and begin to improvise.
Season food with the proper amount of salt at the proper moment; choose the optimal medium of fat to convey the flavor of your ingredients; balance and animate those ingredients with acid; apply the right type and quantity of heat for the proper amount of time — do all this and you will turn out vibrant and beautiful food, with or without a recipe.
“Today we’re going to learn all about emulsions.” (Which she memorably described as “a temporary peace treaty between fat and water.”) If meat were on the syllabus, Samin would often stop by or phone the night before, to make sure the roast or chicken was properly seasoned, which is to say early and amply: at least 24 hours in advance, with about 5 times as much salt as your cardiologist would recommend.
You salted meat so early to give it time to diffuse into the muscle, where it dissolves strands of proteins into a liquid-retaining gel, thus making for moister meat at the same time it builds flavor from the inside out.
There are 4 basic factors that determine how good your food will taste: salt, which enhances flavor; fat, which amplifies flavor and makes appealing textures possible; acid, which brightens and balances; and heat, which ultimately determines the texture of food.
But the cooks rarely consulted cookbooks. How ddi they all seem to know how to cook anything the chef could imagine?
I felt like I’d never catch up. I could hardly imagine the day would come when I’d be able to recognize all the spices in the kitchen’s unlabeled jars. I could barely tell cumin and fennel seeds apart, so the thought of getting to a point where I could ever appreciate the nuanced differences between boillabaisse and cacciuco (2 Mediterranean seafood stews that appeared to be identical) seemed downright impossible.
As I improved, I began to detect the nuances that distinguish good food from great. I started to discern individual components in a dish, understanding when the pasta water and not the sauce needed more salt, or when an herb salsa needed more vinegar to balance a rich, sweet lamb stew. I started to see some basic patterns in the seemingly impenetrable maze of daily-changing, seasonal menus.
The idea of making consistently great food had seemed like some inscrutable mystery, but now I had a little mental checklist to think about every time I set food in a kitchen: Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. I mentioned the theory to one of the chefs. He smiled at me, as if to say, “Duh. Everyone knows that.”
But everyone didn’t know that. I’d never heard or read it anywhere, and certainly no one had ever explicitly related the idea to me. Once I understood it, and once it had been confirmed by a professional chef, it seemed inconceivable that no one had ever framed things in this way for people interested in learning how to cook.
Most often, when a dish fell flat, the answer lay in adjusting the salt. Sometimes it was in the form of salt crystals, but other times it meant a grating of cheese, some pounded anchovies, a few olives, a sprinkling of capers.
Again, a moment’s consideration was all he needed to know the seasoning was off. But now — to save himself the trouble and time, I imagine — he marched me back to the pot and added not 1 but 3 enormous palmfuls of kosher salt.
Some indescribable transformation had occurred. The corn was somehow sweeter, the butter richer. All of the flavors were more pronounced. I’d been certain Cal had ruined the pot and turned my polenta into a salt lick, but no matter how I tried, the word salty did not apply to what I tasted. All I felt was a satisfying zing! with each mouthful.
The secret behind that zing! can be explained by some basic chemistry. Salt is a mineral: sodium chloride. It’s one of several dozen essential nutrients without which we cannot survive. They human body can’t store much salt, so we need to consume it regularly in order to be able to carry out basic biological processes, such as maintaining proper blood pressure and water distribution in the body, delivering nutrients to and from cells, nerve transmission, and muscle movement. In fact, we’re hardwired to crave salt to ensure we get enough of it. The lucky consequence of this is that salt makes almost everything taste better to us.
The primary role that salt plays in cooking is to amplify flavor. Though salt also affects texture and helps modify other flavors, nearly every decision you’ll make about salt will involve enhancing and deepening flavor.
When students balk at the palmfuls of salt I add to pots of water for boiling vegetables, I gently point out that most of the salt will end up going down the drain with the cooking water. In almost every case, anything you cook for yourself at home is more nutritious, and lower in sodium, than processed, prepared, or restaurant food.
If only one lesson from this book stays with you, let it be this: Salt has a greater impact on flavor than any other ingredient. Learn to use it well, and your food will taste good.
These varying shapes and sizes can make a big difference in your cooking. A tablespoon of fine salt will pack more tightly, and can be 2 or 3 times “saltier” than a tablespoon of coarser salt.
Table salt is small and dense, making it very salty. Unless otherwise noted, iodine has been added to it.
I don’t recommend using iodized salt as it makes everything taste slightly metallic.
Table salt also often contains anticaking agents to prevent clumps from forming.
To understand how salt affects flavor, we must first understand what flavor is. Our taste buds can perceive 5 tastes: saltiness, sourness, bitterness, sweetness, and umami, or savoriness. On the other hand, aroma involves our noses sensing any of thousands of various chemical compounds. The descriptive words often used to characterize the way a wine smells, such as earthly, fruity, and floral, refer to aroma compounds.
Flavor lies at the intersection of taste, aroma, and sensory elements including texture, sound, appearance, and temperature. Since aroma is a crucial element of flavor, the more aromas you perceive, the more vibrant your eating experience will be. This is why you take less pleasure in eating while you’re congested or have a cold.
Remarkably, salt affects both taste and flavor. Our taste buds can discern whether or not salt is present, and in what amount. But salt also unlocks many aromatic compounds in foods, making them more readily available as we eat. The simplest way to experience this is to taste an unsalted soup or broth. The unseasoned broth will taste flat, but as you add salt, you’ll detect new aromas that were previously unavailable. Keep salting, and you’ll start to sense the salt as well as more complex and delightful flavors: the savoriness of the chicken, the richness of the chicken fat, the earthiness of the celery and the thyme. Keep adding salt, and tasting, until you get that zing!
Anything that heightens flavor is a seasoning, but the term generally refers to salt since it’s the most powerful flavor enhancer and modifier. If food isn’t salted properly, no amount of fancy cooking techniques or garnishes will make up for it. Without salt, unpleasant tastes are more perceptible and pleasant ones less so.
Some cultures use less salt; others use more. Tuscan don’t add salt to their bread but more than make up for it with the copious handfuls they add to everything else. The French salt baguettes and pain au levain perfectly, in turn seasoning everything else a little more conservatively.
In Japan, steamed rice is left unseasoned to act as the foil for the flavorful dishes, meats, curries, and pickles served alongside it. In India, biryani, a flavorful rice dish layered with vegetables, meat, spices, and eggs, is never left unsalted.
The distribution of salt throughout food can be explained by osmosis and diffusion, 2 chemical processes powered by nature’s tendency to seek equilibrium, or the balanced concentration of solutes such as minerals and sugars on either side of a semipermeable membrane (or holey cell wall). In food, the movement of water across a cell wall from the saltier side to the less salty side is called osmosis.
Diffusion, on the other hand, is the often slower process of salt moving from a saltier environment to a less salty one until it’s evenly distributed throughout.
Water will also be visible on the surface of the chicken, the result of osmosis. While the salt moves in, the water will move out with the same goal: achieving chemical balance throughout the entire piece of meat.
Because salt also initiate osmosis, and visibly draws water out of nearly any ingredient it touches, many people believe that salt dries and toughen food. But with time, salt will dissolve protein strands into a gel, allowing them to absorb and retain water better as they cook. Water moisture: its presence makes meat tender and juicy.
Think of a protein strand as a loose coil with water molecules bound to its outside surface. When an unseasoned protein is heated, it denatures: the coil tightens, squeezing water molecules out of the protein matrix, leaving the meat dry and tough if overcooked. By disrupting protein structure, salt prevents the coil from densely coagulating, or clumping, when heated, so more of the water molecules remain bound. The piece of meat remains moister, and you have a greater margin of error for overcooking.
The chicken salted in advance will fall off the bone as you begin to butcher it, while the other half, though moist, won’t begin to compare in tenderness.
Legumes and grains are dried seeds — the parts of a plant that ensure survival from one season to the next. They’ve evolved tough exterior shells for protection, and require long, gentle cooking in water to absorb enough water to become tender.
If the water is unseasoned or only lightly seasoned, then its concentration of salt — a mineral — will be lower than the innate mineral concentration in the green beans. In an attempt to establish equilibrium between the internal environment of the green beans and the external environment of the cooking water, the beans will relinquish some of their minerals and natural sugars during the cooking process. This leads to bland, gray, less-nutritious green beans.
Remember, salt is a mineral and an essential nutrient. When salted, food undergoes a number of chemical reactions that change the texture and flavor of meat from within.
Pepper, on the other hand, is a spice, and proper spice usage is primarily guided by geography and tradition.
Spices, like coffee, always taste better when ground just before use. Flavor is locked within them in the form of aromatic oils, which are released upon grinding, and again upon heating. The slow leak of time cause preground spices to relinquish flavor.
Cooking isn’t so different from jazz. The best jazz musicians seem to improvise effortlessly, whether by embellishing standards or by stripping them down. Louis Armstrong could take an elaborate melody and distill it down to a single note on his horn, while Ella Fitzgerald could take an utterly simple tune and endlessly elaborate upon it with her extraordinary voice. But in order to be able to improvise flawlessly, they had to learn the basic language of music — the notes — and develop an intimate relationship with the standards.
Besides being one of the four basic elements of good cooking, fat is also 1 or 4 elemental building blocks of all foods, along with water, protein, and carbohydrates. While it’s commonly believed that fat, much like salt, is universally unhealthy, both elements are essential to human survival. Fat serves as a crucial backup energy source, a way to store energy for future use, and plays a role in nutrient absorption and essential metabolic functions, such as brain growth.
While salt is a mineral, use primarily to enhance flavor, fat plays 3 distinct roles in the kitchen: as a main ingredient, as a cooking medium, and, like salt, as seasoning.
Certain fats can also be used as seasoning to adjust flavor or enrich the texture of a dish just before serving: a few drops of toasted sesame oil will deepen the flavors in a bowl or rice, a dollop of sour cream will offer silky richness to a cup of soup, a little mayonnaise spread on a BLT will increase its succulence, and a smear of cultured butter on a piece of crusty bread will add untold richness.
Put simply, fat carries flavor. While certain fats have their own distinct flavors, any fat can convey aromas — and enhance flavors — to our palates that would otherwise go unnoticed. Fat coats the tongue, allowing various aromatic compounds to stay in contact with our taste buds for longer periods of time, intensifying and prolonging our experience of various flavors.
In some foods, browning will introduce entirely new flavors, including nuttiness, sweetness, meatiness, earthiness, and savoriness. Imagine the difference in flavor between a poached chicken breast and one browned on the stove in a little olive oil, and the incalculable value of this attribute will be clear.
Unlike oil, butter is not pure fat — it also contains water, milk protein, and whey solids, which provide much of its flavor.
Some fat ends up layered between groups of muscles, or directly under their skin, as in the cap of fat on the outside of a pork loin or prime rib. Some fat ends up within a muscle. This is the more prized kind of fat — what we call marbling when we look at a steak. As a well-marbled steak cooks, the fat will melt, making the meat juicier from within. And since fat carries flavor, many of the chemical compounds that make any one kind of meat taste like itself (beef like beef, pork like pork, chicken like chicken) are more concentrated in fat than in lean muscle. That’s why, for example, chicken thighs taste more chickeny than the leaner breast meat.
Human love crisp and crunchy foods. The word crispy sells more food than almost any other adjective. Crisp foods stoke our appetites by conjuring up past experiences of foods with pleasing aromas, tastes, and sounds.
For food to become crisp, the water trapped in its cells must evaporate. Water evaporates as it boils, so the surface temperature of the ingredient must climb beyond the boiling point of 212F.
To achieve this effect on the entire surface of the food, it needs to be in direct, even contact with a heat source, such as a pan at temperatures well beyond water’s boiling point. But no food is perfectly smooth, and at the microscopic level, most pans aren’t either. In order to get even contact between the food and the pan, we need a medium: fat.
Preheat the pan to reduce the amount of time fats spends in direct contact with the hot metal, minimizing opportunity for it to deteriorate. As oil is heated, it breaks down, leading to flavor degradation and the release of toxic chemicals. Food is also more likely to stick to a cold pan — another reason to preheat.
The smoke point of a fat is the temperature at which it decomposes and transforms into a visible, noxious gas.
Delicate foods especially suffer in these instances. Cooking in fat that’s insufficiently hot will cause food to absorb the oil, resulting in unappetizingly beige, greasy fish filets, cooked through but not golden. Steaks and pork chops placed in cold fat will take so long to so that by the time they appear to be perfectly cooked, the meat will be well-done, rather than medium-rare.
Once you have achieved crispness, do your best to retain it: do not cover or pile up crisp foods while they are still hot. They will continue to release steam. The lid will entrap steam, which will condense and drip back onto the food, making it soggy.
One of the great chemical wonders of the kitchen, an emulsion happens when 2 liquids that normally don’t like to mix together or dissolve give up and join together. In the kitchen, an emulsion is like a temporary peace treaty between fat and water. The result is tiny droplets of one liquid dispersed in another, resulting in a creamy mixture that’s neither one nor the other. Butter, ice cream, mayonnaise, and even chocolate — if it’s creamy and rich, chances are it’s an emulsion.
One of my favorite poets once described butter as “coagulated sunlight,” which might be the most elegant and economical way to describe its special alchemy.
Butter, unlike oil, isn’t pure fat. It’s fat, water, and milk solids all held together in a state of emulsion. While most emulsions are stable in a narrow range of temperatures (just a few degrees), butter retains its solid form from freezing temperature (32F) until it melts (90F). Compare this to what happens when you heat or freeze mayonnaise — it’ll break quickly — and the magic of butter will become clear.
This explains why butter sweats when left on the kitchen counter on a hot day - the water separates from the fat as it melts. At even warmer temperatures — in a pan over a hot burner, or in the microwave — butter’s fat and water will immediately separate. Melted butter, then, is a broken emulsion, hardening as it cools, never to return to its former miraculous state.
Sometimes, you seek to break an emulsion, as when you melt butter to clarify it. Other times, it’s a disaster. Het a chocolate sauce too quickly and it will break into a greasy, undesirable mess that even I wouldn’t pour over ice cream after the longest day.
As gluten develops, dough becomes chewier. This is why bread bakers use flours with relatively high protein content, and work hard to knead doughs for long periods of time to create crusty, chewy country loaves. Salt also preserves the strength of the gluten network. But pasty chefs generally seek tender, flaky, and moist textures, so they do everything they can to limit or control gluten development, including using low protein flours and avoiding overkneading. Sugar and acids such as buttermilk or yogurt also discourage gluten from developing, so adding them early on will tenderize pastries.
4 mains variable will determine the texture of any baked goos (and some nonbaked ones, such as pasta): fat, water, yeast, and how much the dough or batter is kneaded or worked.
To prevent gluten from developing, keep butter cold. This will protect the delicate bonds of its emulsion while you mix and roll dough. Butter contains about 15 to 20% water by weight. If butter softens and melts as it’s worked into the dough, its emulsion will break, releasing that water. Water droplets will bind with the flour, developing into long gluten strands that will cause the dough’s delicate layers to stick together. If they’re stuck together, they can’t steam apart and flake as they bake. The pastry will emerge from the oven chewy and elastic.
Oil efficiently coats flour proteins and prevents strong gluten networks from forming, much like soft butter does in shortbread. Gluten development requires water, so this old barrier significantly inhibits gluten formation, leading to a tender, rather than chewy, texture.
Acid had been tucked into every dish, and it had brought the meal to life. Sour cream lent a tang to mashed potatoes. A splash of white wine added just before serving lightened the gravy. Hidden in the big, beautiful mass of stuffing among torn sourdough croutons, greens, and bites of sausage were prunes soaked in white wine — secret caches of acid, most welcome.
Vinegar? Who’d ever heard of putting vinegar in soup? Was Russ crazy? I didn’t want to ruin the entire pot, so I took a spoonful of my beautiful soup and added a single drop of red wine vinegar. Tasting it, I was floored. I’d expected the vinegar to turn the soup into a sweet-and-sour abomination. Instead, the vinegar acted like a prism, revealing the soup’s nuanced flavors — I could taste the butter and oil, the onion and stock, even the sugar and minerals within the carrots. If blindfolded and quizzed, never in a million years would I have been able to identify vinegar as one of the ingredients. But now, if something I cooked and seasoned ever tasted so dull again, I’d know exactly what was missing.
It was finally clear to me — acid is salt’s alter ego. While salt enhances flavors, acid balances them. By acting as a foil to salt, fat, sugar, and starch, acid makes itself indispensable to everything we cook.
Anything fermented, from cheese and sourdough bread to coffee and chocolate, will lend a pleasant tang to your food, as will most fruits, including that vegetable-posing chameleon, the tomato.
The term mouthwatering has long been a synonym for delicious. Foods that are the most enjoyable to eat cause our mouths to water — that is, to produce saliva. Of the 5 basic tastes, acid makes our mouths water the most. When we eat anything sour, our mouths flood with saliva to balance out the acidity, as it’s dangerous for our teeth. The more acidic the food, the more saliva rushes in. Acid, then, is an integral part of many of our most pleasurable eating experience.
Yet on its own, acid isn’t particularly gratifying. It’s the way acid contrasts with other tastes that heightens our pleasure in foods. Like salt, acid heightens other flavors. But it works a bit differently: while the salt threshold is absolute, acid balance is relative.
Acid dulls vibrant greens, so wait until the last possible moment to dress salads, mix vinegar into herb salsas, and squeeze lemon over cooked green vegetables such as spinach.
On the other hand, acid keeps reds and purple vivid.
The chemical reaction involved in browning sugars is called caramelization. The chemical reaction involved in browning meats, seafood, vegetables, baked goods, or just about anything else is called the Maillard reaction.
Though they’re entirely different processes, caramelization and the Maillard reaction share some similarities. Both create acidic flavor compounds, in addition to many other tasty molecules, as by-products. As it caramelizes, a single sugar molecule will develop into hundreds of new and different compounds, including some acids. In other words, equal amounts of sugar and burn caramel by weight are not equally sweet, and in fact caramel is acidic. Similar acidic compounds are produced in carbohydrates and proteins by the Maillard reaction.
Imagine tasting 2 batches of ice cream, both made with the same amount of sugar. In one batch, the sugar was added directly to the dairy. In the other batch, some of the sugar was cooked into dark caramel before being mixed in. The ice cream made with caramelized sugar will not only taste less sweet but will also be far more complex, because it has the vital flavor contrasts that acid provides.
The other, much slower, method for producing acid in the kitchen is fermentation, where, in addition to many other flavor-producing processes, carbohydrates transform into carbon dioxide and acids or alcohols using yeasts, bacteria, or a combination thereof. Wine, beer, and cider are of course fermented, but so are naturally leavened breads, all sorts of pickles, cured meats, cultured dairy, and even coffee and chocolate.
As with all good cooking, the best way to use acid well is to taste, over and over again. Using acid is much like using salt: if something is noticeably sour, it’s probably got too much acid. But if a food tastes bright and clean, then its acid balance is spot-on.
Cooking acids tend to be mellow, transforming the foods with which they are cooked slowly, over time. They can be extraordinarily subtle; while their presence may go undetected, their absence is sharply felt.
Umami is, in fact, the result of flavor compounds called glutamates. The most familiar glutamate is monosodium glutamate, or MSG, the white powder often generously used in the kitchens of Chinese restaurants to enhance flavor. Though MSG is chemically manufactured, there are also many natural sources of glutamates. 2 foods most abundant in naturally occurring glutamates are Parmesan and tomato ketchup. There are those of us who always crave ketchup with our burgers and fries, and not only because of the sweetness, salt, and acid that it provides. A little ketchup — and the umami it offers — makes things taste inexplicably more delicious.
Imagine taking a tie of the perfect peach: it’s sweet, juicy, and firm, yet giving.
But is that all? It’s also acidic. Without that pucker, it’d be all sugar.
Pastry chefs know that the best thing we can do in our cooking is to mimic this perfection — there’s no better model for getting that sweet-sour balance just right than nature itself.
She pointed out that we hadn’t been at the table with her, piling salad onto a plate laden with grilled lamb and shelling beans, garnished with a decadent sauce, following courses of creamy lasagna and rich shellfish soup. On a plate with all of that other stuff, it wasn’t doing its job — a salad should relieve your palate and leave it clean after rich, muddy foods. It needed more acid to stand up to the other intense flavors.
In order to make the best salad, you have to consider how it fits into the meal.
When aspiring chefs ask me for career advice, I offer a few tips: Cook every single day. Taste everything thoughtfully. Go to the farmers’ market and familiarize yourself with each season’s produce. Read everything Paula Wolfert, James Beard, Marcella Hazan, and Jane Grigson have written about food. Write a letter to your favorite restaurant professing your love and beg for an apprenticeship. Skip culinary school; spend a fraction of the cost of tuition traveling the world instead.
As I traveled, I noticed that in every country, whether I was watching home cooks or professional chefs, and whether they were cooking over live fire or on a camp stove, the best cooks looked at the food, not the heat source.
I saw how good cooks obeyed sensory cues, rather than timers and thermometers.
Simply put, heat is energy.
Food is primarily made up of four basic types of molecules: water, fat, carbohydrates, and protein. As food is heated, the molecules within it begin to speed up, colliding with each other as they go.
As molecules gain speed, they also gain the power to break free of the electrical forces uniting their atoms. Some atoms can split off and join up with other atoms to create new molecules. This process is called a chemical reaction.
On a much, much tinier scale — at the cellular level — a similar phenomenon occurs inside foods: as food freeze, its cell walls will burst when the water they contain expands. Freezer burn and dehydration, then, are the result of water escaping from the inside of a food’s cells and then crystalizing or vaporizing on the surface of the food.
Heat water further, to 212F, and it boils, giving us one of the most efficient — and quickest — ways to cook food.
Encourage steam to escape if you want temperatures to rise and food to brown. Contain and recycle steam with a lid to allow food to cook in a moist environment if you want to prevent or delay browning.
Choose your cooking vessel based on how steam will move within and out of it. Pans with sloped or curved sides are better at allowing steam to escape than pans with straight sides. And the taller the sides of the pan or pot, the longer it will take steam to escape. Deep pots and pans are great for sweating onions and simmering soups, but less ideal for foods you aim to sear and brown quickly, such as scallops and steaks.
Like water, fat is both a basic component of food and a cooking medium. But fat and water are enemies: they don’t mix, and they respond very differently to heat.
Fats are flexible; indeed, the broad range of temperatures fats can withstand allows us to achieve many different textures — crisp, flaky, tender, creamy, and light — that simply cannot be achieved without the proper relationship between Fat and Heat.
At moderate temperatures, fat is an ideal gentle cooking medium, perfect for using in a cooking method called confit, which is essentially poaching in fat instead of water.
Dry seeds, grains, and legumes, including rice, beans, barley, chickpeas, and wheatberries, generally need water and heat to make them edible. To protect the potential for life that they contain, seeds have evolved with tough sheaths that make them nearly impossible for us to digest unless we transform them in some way.
Some grains are processed to remove some or all of this outer sheath — hence the difference between whole wheat and refined flour or brown and white rice. Without that tough exterior, processed grains cook much more quickly and have a longer shelf-life than their whole-grain counterparts.
At extremely high temperatures (340F), sugar molecules begin to darken in color, in a process that isn’t entirely understood, as they decompose and reorganize into hundreds of new compounds, generating abundant new flavors. This is caramelization, and it’s one of the most essential ways heat affects flavor. In addition to producing acidic flavor compounds, caramelized sugars introduce a slew of new qualities and flavors, including bitter, fruity, caramel, nutty, sherry, and butterscotch.
As heat penetrates a boiling carrot, its starches begin to break down into simple sugars. The cell walls enclosing these sugars begin to disintegrate. This frees the sugars to reach our taste buds more readily, making the cooked carrot taste far sweeter than its raw counterpart.
The small amounts of sugars that most vegetables contain begin to disappear the moment they’re picked, which is why just-picked produce is so much more sweet and flavorful than store-bought.
It helps me to picture proteins as coiled threads floating around in water. This definition proves particularly useful when visualizing how temperature affects proteins. As with acid, when exposed to heat, the threads first denature, or unwind, and then clump together more tightly, or coagulate, entrapping pockets of water, to create structure in food.
A little salt can help keep proteins from drying out. Given enough time, salt will tinker with the structure of meat proteins, reducing their capacity to expel water. Consequently, meat that has been salted early will be indescribably moist when cooked properly, and even forgive being slightly overcooked.
Continue heating proteins in the presence of carbohydrates, and a remarkable thing happens: the Maillard reaction, heat’s most significant contribution to flavor. Compare bread to toasted bread, raw to seared tuna, boiled to grilled meat or vegetables. In each case, the browned version is much richer and more delightfully complex in flavor, a result of the Maillard reaction.
Learn to take browning fearlessly to the edge, because that’s where the deepest flavors lie.
It’s tempting to think that cooking begins with the click of the gas burner or the turn of the oven dial. It doesn’t. Cooking begins much, much earlier, with the temperature of your ingredients.
Let all meats — except for the thinnest cuts — come to room temperature before you cook them. The larger the roast, the earlier you can pull it out of the fridge.
Sweet, bitter, and umami tastes are more intense and send stronger signals to the brain when food is warmer. As any college student can tell you, the same pint of beer, while delicious chilled, will be unpalatably bitter at room temperature. Or try a bite of cheese straight from the fridge. It won’t taste like much. Let the cheese come to room temperature.
Baking, the most precise endeavor in the kitchen, is powered by its most imprecise source of heat: the oven. Humans have never had much control over exact oven temperatures. The only difference is that when ovens were still powered by live fire, no one believed that he or she could control temperature with the turn of a dial.
Set the average home oven to 350F, and it’ll heat up to about 370F before the heating element shuts off.
Since the boiling point of water is such an important kitchen landmark, I’d always assumed boiling to be the most straightforward cooking method: just drop food into a pot of bubbling water and pull it out when it’s done. Then one day, a lightbulb went off: when it comes to cooking food in liquid, cooking through at a rolling boil is the exception rather than the rule.
I realized boiling is called for only when cooking vegetable, grains, and pasta; reducing sauces; and hard-cooking eggs. I could bring everything else — and I mean everything — to a boil and then swiftly reduce it to a simmer to cook through. Since simmering water is gentler than boiling water, it won’t jostle delicate foods so much that they fall apart or agitate tougher foods so much that overcook on the surface before cooking through completely.
Think of these long-cooked dishes as opportunities to layer in flavor. Every step of the way, consider how to infuse the most flavor into the dish and extract the deepest flavor out of every individual ingredient.
Add too much food or too little water, and a pot’s temperature will drop drastically. A rolling boil will come to a rocking halt. Pasta will clump. Do justice to any food you blanch and keep water at a rolling boil by using twice as much as you think you need.
Boiling is an extraordinarily efficient cooking method, perfect for preserving the flavor of fresh vegetable. Boil vegetables long enough to let heat degrade their internal cell walls and release their sugars, and so that their starches can convert to sugars, developing sweetness.
Noodles made with wheat flour must be cooked in water at a vigorous boil in order to cook evenly, regardless of whether you call them pasta, ramen, bakmi, udon, or elbow macaroni.
Confit is the French word for foods cooked slowly in fat at temperatures low enough to avoid browning. It’s one of the few times you’ll use fat as a cooking medium without the goal of browning.
Sweating is a gentle way of cooking vegetables in minimal fat until they are tender and translucent, without resulting in browning. As they cook, they release some liquid, hence the name.
The term saute is derived from the French word for “jump,” and it refers to the little jab of the wrist used to flip all of the food in a pan.
The no.1 rule of grilling: never cook directly over the flame. Flames leave soot, unpleasant flavors, and carcinogens on food. Instead, the the flames subside and cook over smoldering coals and embers.
Whether you’re working with gas or a live fire, create different temperature zones on your grill, like various burners on a stove.
The different between roasting and toasting is simple: toasting implies browning the surface of a food, while roasting also cooks food through.
To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.