Keys to Good Cooking

The CC received the latest Harold McGee book as a gift, and he started reading it right away. Clearly, the CC's friends know what will make the CC salivate.

Strangely, the book felt awfully flat. It started seeming like a (absurdly) well-researched book but without any context. A newcomer encountering this book would be hopelessly lost, and the experienced cook would find it to be a parade of the obvious.

The CC was a bit dejected at this point since he is a big fan.

Then, he came across the following paragraph, and his heart lept with joy:

My father likes his hamburger rarer than rare — "Wave it near the grill," he would say — and he regularly suffered for it. Ground meats are among the foods most frequently contaminated with harmful microbes. When he moved close enough for me to cook for him, I told him that I would take care of his hamburger habit, and developed a way to prepare the meat to ensure its safety even when it's barely cooked (see p. 240). Ever since, both of us have been able to relax and enjoy our burgers without a second thought.

The CC loves his steak tartare, and the like. What followed on page 240 was so unbelievably obvious, and yet so elegant and unique that it's a total surprise that this is not more known.

As far as the CC was concerned, the book was redeemed, and Harold McGee can now be reinstated to his pedestal.

The "solution" which is totally obvious is:

Buy beef of excellent quality where the interior is unlikely to be contaminated.

The exterior will always be contaminated since microbes and fungus are in the air all around us.

Microbes are killed by boiling water.

Insert the steak in boiling water for 30-60 seconds to kill the external microbes.

Immediately dunk in an ice-bath to stop the cooking (= rare beef.)

Do what you will to get your beef rare (burgers, tartare, etc.)

Consume immediately.

Quelle elegance!

"Cooking Makes You Human"

An excellent review from the New York Times: Why Are Humans Different From All Other Apes? It’s the Cooking, Stupid.

Human beings are not obviously equipped to be nature’s gladiators. We have no claws, no armor. That we eat meat seems surprising, because we are not made for chewing it uncooked in the wild. Our jaws are weak; our teeth are blunt; our mouths are small. That thing below our noses? It truly is a pie hole.

To attend to these facts, for some people, is to plead for vegetarianism or for a raw-food diet. We should forage and eat the way our long-ago ancestors surely did. For Richard Wrangham, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard and the author of “Catching Fire,” however, these facts and others demonstrate something quite different. They help prove that we are, as he vividly puts it, “the cooking apes, the creatures of the flame.”

“Catching Fire” is a plain-spoken and thoroughly gripping scientific essay that presents nothing less than a new theory of human evolution, one he calls “the cooking hypothesis,” one that Darwin (among others) simply missed.

“Cooked food does many familiar things,” he observes. “It makes our food safer, creates rich and delicious tastes and reduces spoilage. Heating can allow us to open, cut or mash tough foods. But none of these advantages is as important as a little-appreciated aspect: cooking increases the amount of energy our bodies obtain from food.”

He then delivers a thorough, delightfully brutal takedown of the raw-food movement and its pieties. He cites studies showing that a strict raw-foods diet cannot guarantee an adequate energy supply, and notes that, in one survey, 50 percent of the women on such a diet stopped menstruating. There is no way our human ancestors survived, much less reproduced, on it. He seems pleased to be able to report that raw diets make you urinate too often, and cause back and hip problems.

Mr. Wrangham also dismisses, for complicated social and economic reasons, the popular Man-the-Hunter hypothesis about evolution, which posits that meat-eating alone was responsible. Meat eating “has had less impact on our bodies than cooked food,” he writes. “Even vegetarians thrive on cooked diets. We are cooks more than carnivores.”

This is an eminently judicious argument for one extraordinarily simple reason - that plants have no defense mechanisms against predators is completely risible.

And we humans are fierce predators!

It just turns out that the various fiery techniques - roasting, steaming, boiling, etc. negate the defense mechanims in very aggressive ways (for example, look here.)

The CC may make fun of the vegetables occasionally because they are effectively guilt-seeking hairshirt-types with a completely bullshit pseudo-moralistic view of the world (and the CC is a frisky, guilt-free, pleasure-maximizing hedonistic omnivore) but the vegans and the raw-foods are the complete and utter retards. They simply do not understand at a functional level how cooking and eating actually proceeds. To cut the crap, they are simply wrong.