Constructing a Meal

(This article was written earlier but Blogger has a rather annoying "auto-save" feature and the article got deleted. The CC had to rewrite it from scratch.)

One of the things that perennially bugs the CC is that neither home chefs nor professional chefs give any insight whatsoever into how a meal is actually constructed.

This has something fundamentally to do with the "recipe" format of cookbooks. One really needs an entirely alternate model that works at the meal level.

Cookbooks also rely on the entirely unreliable fact that people just magically absorb knowledge by "osmosis" and "culture". Both of these seem to be demonstrably false assertions. Since one is not always granted the luxury of an Italian nonna or an Japanese obaachan and since kids are not born knowing complex culinary logic when yanked from the womb, one is left with the inescapable conclusion that all knowledge is learned.

That means one should be able to both teach it and learn it.

The CC is going to use himself as an example.

The only thing planned before the Saturday was that the meal would be Japanese and it would feature some form of clams - either asari gohan (= あさりご飯 = clam rice) or asari no miso dashijiru (= あさり味噌汁, clam miso soup.)

The CC arrived at the farmers' market on a frigid Saturday morning only to find that most of the vendors were missing. It was already turning into a disaster.

Thankfully there was one vegetable vendor and the fishmonger was around.

Cauliflowers were obtained (purple, romanesco) as were some carrots. The CC noted that he had exactly two Italian flat beans and two cherry tomatoes at home. This was going to be a tricky operation.

The CC noted that there were no scallions at home and none at the market neither. However, he did have some homemade furikake already prepared. That put paid to the idea of the asari gohan (because of the black furikake) and hence it was going to the be the clams with miso soup.

(Note how we rarely make decisions. They are made for us already.)

Luckily, the CC still had one of the last of the late summer cucumbers so a quick sunomono (vinegar pickle) was added to the mix. The CC still had some pickled ginger in his cabinet. The vegetables were steamed and combined with a modified tare sauce that the CC just loves. The dish can be made ahead of time and is actually better at room temperature rather than warm.

The CC needed a fifth dish (rice doesn't count) and he had carrots so he made the classic quick stir-fried dish with carrots and hijiki.

The meal follows the entirely Japanese principles of washoku (= 和食) — there are five vegetables of different colors, five methods, five tastes, etc.

The rules above might have a Japanese origin but they are not laws of nature. They are just an excellent set of rules-of-thumb to ensure nutritional completeness and stave away boredom. The CC finds himself using the rules even if he's making a classically French dinner or an Indian one.

Dinner is served.

Five autumn vegetables with modified "tare" sauce
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Clam miso soup
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Cucumber sunomono
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Sweet-sour hijiki
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Pickled white ginger
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White rice with furikake

The Sealing of the Pot

The CC received a clay pot as a gift recently.

It was a classic meen chatti (मीन चट्टी - literally: fish clay pot). The first word is from Sanskrit (= fish) and the second most likely from the local vernacular.

Instructions were provided to "season it" but the CC needs to understand what that means so he proceeded down the rabbit hole (as he is wont to do) about what that really entails.

Clay is quite porous as a material. However, it can be fired at high temperatures after which it becomes hard. That's how bricks are made which has been known since at least Sumerian times.

Clay is also an extraordinarily poor conductor of heat.

These combined facts act as an advantage in fish cookery.

The critical point about a clay pot is that no matter how hard you try to heat it in a reasonable time (= less than five hours, for example), it's very difficult to raise the temperature of the interior of the pot to above 70°C^† — which is the outer limit of the temperature that fish proteins denature.

Of course, if you fired the crap out of the pot, eventually it would rise to the temperature of the flame but we're talking cooking here not cremation!

The other critical point is that if you don't raise the temperature beyond the denaturation point of fish proteins, they will stay soft independent of the cooking time. If you held the temperature precisely at a certain point, your fish would stay perfectly tender whether you cooked it for ten minutes or ten hours!

This is how airlines control food, for the record. The temperature is never allowed to get above the denaturation point of the proteins in question — chicken, beef, fish, vegetables, whatever!

The principle of clay-pot cooking is the same as that of sous-vide cooking except that it is being done in an intuitive way rather than formally. It also has a massive advantage over sous-vide in that you can fry or sear the fish and have it cook in the complex juices generated by it. You don't need to worry about the problem of precise timing either which was a useful fact in the frenetic frazzled world of yore unlike modern day times.

There's a price to be paid for this freedom. Nothing comes for free.

The pot is a complex apparatus. If you drop one of your metal pots, it'll get dented. If you drop a clay pot, it shatters and you get to start all over again. (Luckily, they are cheap but that's not the point.)

Poor conduction also goes both ways. It's really hard to raise the temperature and it's equally hard to lower the temperature. A certain boring-ness is required in the usage of a clay pot. You can't just dial the temperature up and down like a metal pot.

Much more importantly, you can't add hot water to a cold pot, or cold water to a hot pot. It will crack. The poor conduction means you cannot have the interior and the exterior at significantly different temperatures.

The seasoning of the pot is really quite simple once you grasp the concepts. You alternate boiling cold water in the pot and toss it out followed by coating it with cooking oil overnight. The water percolates through the pot and mends micro-holes in the clay and the oil conducted via the water generates enough carbon residues to plug the holes. It also generates a non-stick surface at the bottom of the pot over time (exactly like a great cast-iron frying pan.)

There are two fallacies about clay pots and since chez CC, we tend to be the analytic sort, we're going to dismiss them.

The first is that the seasoned clay pot is not porous — it absolutely is! The water inside the seasoned pot has to be going somewhere. It's not evaporating significantly at 70°C^‡ so it must be disappearing somehow. It's evaporating through the porosity of the pot. It's being wicked^§ away.

This porosity created a bit of a problem for the CC in the second round of water seasoning when the pot had been coated with oil overnight. Enough oil/water was being wicked away through the porous clay that the CC's gas flame went a little crazy. It's basically a baby version of a grease fire. It was such a minuscule amount of oil that it posed no risk whatsoever but it was quite unnerving until the principles had been grasped.

The second which is really the flip of the first is the myth that you can't cook in a dry pot without water. You absolutely can as long if you want to raise the temperature above 70°C. You could quite plausibly cook the clay pot to up to 1000° C but the CC really doubts that your puny stove generates enough BTU's for that. (Your oven only goes up to 275°C!)

Remember, if you do amp up the temperature of the pot, you will not be able to add cold water to it. You must either cool the pot down and start over or heat the water to the same temperature and add it. Most cooks do the former not the later since it's too risky.

In fact, many recipes ask you to first boil stuff till the water disappears, take the fish out, and then use the pot just like a frying pan adding the fish back at the last step. (The reverse is also true. Some recipes ask you to use it like a frying pan and then add the fish and warm water a little at a time thus lowering the temperature back down.)

Let's abstract out the principles of the perfectly seasoned clay pot.

[1] With water inside, the temperature will not go above 70°C until the water disappears.

[2] The clay pot is a very poor conductor of heat.

[3] The dry clay pot will allow you to fire it up to 1000°C.

Now that we've grasped the principles, we're ready to roll.

One of the great glories of Mughal cooking is the perfectly cooked daal. This involves the denaturing of lentil proteins and some of these lentils tend to get slimy if the skins split. The clay pot is the ideal apparatus since it preserves the skin perfectly while letting the water and spices to enrich the dish via osmosis but not allowing the lentils to burst.

The truly great dish of Gujarati cooking is undhiyu (ઊંધિયું — literally: upside-down.) The Mughals totally envied this dish! It's a classic mélange of spring vegetables, complex vegetarian meatball-esque preparations, and spices cooked in a sealed upside-down (sic) pot in the dying embers of a fire overnight at low heat. Same logic goes for long-term low-temperature cooking and the denaturing of the proteins.

If you go to North India during winter, you'll find yogurt served in clay pots. The clay pots are being used for two purposes — heat preservation and water-evaporation. Even in the cold temperatures of the North-Indian winter, the clay pots retain the heat of the warm mixture of milk and bacteria^¶ and wick away enough water to make the yogurt rich and delicious.

So this device which is at least 20,000 years old (based on Chinese excavations that date back to 18,000 BC) is truly a magic apparatus. It just requires a little understanding.

We're just the latest in a truly ancient lineage.

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† You can verify this quickly and empirically by sticking a finger for less than a second into the water that has been boiling in the clay pot for an hour. Nothing much will happen. If you stuck your finger in real boiling water for even less than a second, you would get second-degree burns!

‡ The CC will not bore you with the details but roughly speaking in an environment with no air-flow (e.g. your exhaust fan) the evaporation rate is linear in the temperature differential between water and air for temperatures around 100°C. Estimating your house to be about 25°C (80°F), you are only getting roughly 60% of the evaporation of boiling water. The rest of the water has to be going somewhere!

§ You can test this by covering a pot and heating water in it. It will never boil but soon much of the water will be gone.

¶ The clay pots have the advantage of porosity. The yogurt bacteria are sitting in there and they help develop the culture implicitly particularly if you make yogurt every day or week in the same pot. (The clay pots that they use are small. Individual use, one might say, in modern parlance.)

The Potato Chronicles

Have you ever had an experience where you ask yourself why something so obvious is so completely unknown?

The CC is going to discuss roasted potatoes and French fries and what they have in common.

It's a well-known fact among connoisseurs of the humble potato that the best way to fry it is in various versions of animal fats. Goose fat, duck fat, chicken fat and horse fat. Expensive but mind-blowingly awesome.

What also makes the perfect fry is that the surface is crispy and brown (tastes come from the Maillard reaction) and the insides perfectly soft and creamy. It's the contrast that makes it work. Here's a refresher to the science.

The potato has been a staple in many cuisines once the New World was discovered. It rapidly spread across the globe. Roasting it aside the meat which shed its fat was a common and delicious idea.

The innovation which surprised the CC last night was simple. Instead of letting the potato roast, the chef took a medium-sized potato, peeled it, sliced it vertically into thin sections that were still attached at the base — leaving the potato whole —  and roasted it. It's simple knife-work. This thin slicing meant that the edges of the potato were completely crispy while the insides were completely creamy. The potato was clearly roasted with some goose fat and served with the roasted goose giving the dish a coherent feel.

It's such a simple idea and yet so radical.

Bacterial Overload

Recently the CC went to one of those outdoor street fairs where there was a pickle stand. They were also selling some of the pickled juice blended with tomatoes as a "Bloody Mary Mix". The vendors kept apologizing and warning clients who wanted to buy it that it was not pasteurized.

And the CC was completely nonplussed, "So it has come to this?"

It doesn't need to be pasteurized!

There is a fundamental lack of understanding by people who work in food about our relationship with other bio-agents and particularly the organisms that we are deeply symbiotic with namely bacteria.

At this point in time, advertising agencies have basically convinced consumers that bacteria are "evil" but nothing could be further from the truth.

The standard mechanism of cultivating bacteria in the lab is creating something called a "culture". Basically, a swab of bacteria are grown on a substrate and then examined under a microscope. Based on this, it was estimated that something like 1% of a human mass was actually bacteria. Little did people know how wrong this estimate turned out to be.

In the early part of the 21st century, the price of DNA sequencers fell precipitously. What used to be an expensive tool became dirt cheap. Scientists had the entirely brilliant idea of not measuring bacteria by mass but by what percentage of DNA of our body was made up of bacteria. Turns out the answer is between 90-99%.

Remember the two estimates are of different things. One is by weight and the other is by percentage of DNA that is non-human. They are different things but the latter estimate is clearly the more important.

To put it differently, we humans exist for the benefit of the bacteria not the other way around. Of course, we are extraordinarily symbiotic with them. We provide them the food and they provide us both protection by repelling all the "bad bacteria" and do significant portions of body work for us.

In fact, the bacteria on your left and right hands are completely different.

So why did the earlier scientists get it so wrong? How can the estimates be so off?

You should be able to guess the answer. Not every bacteria can grow in the "culture". In fact, they can only survive in that localized environment inside the body that they have adapted to.

The answer is even more complex. There's no such thing as "good" or "bad" bacteria. It's contextual. You move the "good" bacteria from the right spot where they are supposed to be into the wrong spot and they will become "bad" bacteria. The context is completely important.

The bacteria that we are the most symbiotic with is a family called lactobacillus. Every time, you eat yogurt, eat or drink miso, eat pickles, cheese, kimchi, drink beer or wine, you are basically consuming them in vast quantities. They do the fermentation for us, and in turn, they repel other harmful bacteria for us. We are completely reliant on them.

So now maybe you can guess why the pickled juice blended with tomatoes did not need to be pasteurized?

The lactobacilli would repel any invader which there are not that many of to start with because of the acidity of the environment. The lactobacilli are the rare family that has adapted to the acidic environment thanks to their symbiosis with us.

Fermented foods have a long history of being considered "good for you". It was just an empirical observation over large swathes of human history in vastly different regions and contexts but they all came to the same conclusion.

Only in the 21st century is science able to actually dissect how all these various extraordinarily-complex mechanisms actually work.

But the CC's point is a lot larger. How have we gotten to a point where the most basic food interaction is fraught with anxiety? The answer is that Madison Ave. has made you paranoid.

The CC never relies on the expiration dates for milk. Just smell it. It's pretty obvious. Sometimes it will go bad before the expiration date!

The same goes for fermentation and fermented products. They work in a complex way and made correctly will last forever. Experienced picklers never throw out the juice. They use a cup of it to start off the next batch because it has the complex blend of bacteria all ready to give the next batch the right start.

Pickling is one of the greatest achievements in food technology. Just remember that for most of human history, humans were food deprived. Our modern calorie-rich environment is an extraordinarily recent development barely 50 years old. Pickling was the trick that allowed humans to store food for the winter. It also gave variety and complexity to their diet and the symbiotic relationship with the bacteria made for healthier humans.

The CC hopes that this explanation convinces people not to think of bacteria as "evil" but our necessary partners in the game of life. We need them; they need us. We can't actually function without them.

So the next time you're at the fair eating a pickle-on-a-stick, you should not think to yourself "Ooh! crunchy cucumber", you should really be thinking "Ooh! Tons of bacteria with a side helping of crunchy cucumber!"

Fowl Technical Tricks

One of the ways in which great chefs distinguish themselves from routine ones is a whole array of technical tricks that make all the difference in the world.

Here's one that works wonders. It will give the chicken a depth of flavor even if you use it in a context where the crispiness of the skin is not important.

The magical step is to first pan-sear the chicken in duck fat. Of course, Maestro Maillard^† is doing his magic. The chicken is then lifted out, blotted, and the fat is discarded.

There is an additional advantage here. You need to wash the chicken and dry it before you pan-fry it but you don't need to cut off the fat. The fat will get rendered and "disappear" and you won't need to deal with it. Laziness raised to pure perfection in the arms of technique!

You can then proceed to make the chicken in whatever fashion you like. Even in a conventional stew or soup, the difference is striking. The CC has had friends ask if the dish was cooked in "tons of butter"? Not even close.

The dish below is a classic Moroccan dish. It's the "little black dress" of Moroccan cooking. You need to have it in your repertoire. It's a total crowd-pleaser and one for the ages.

If you don't have a tagine use a solid pot that you can seal with foil. The seal is necessary.

Why is something so simple so magical?

Three reasons.

Firstly, the Maillard reaction with the chicken plus the miniscule remnants of the duck fat on the surface cells which make their way into the sauce. Secondly, the depth of flavor by a long slow braise where the chicken effectively cooks in its own juices. Lastly, the intense burst of both flavor and umami from the preserved lemons which add a  delectable citrus note as a baseline flavor. The fresh herbs add their own contribution as well.

Is this technique "traditional" (whatever the hell that word means)?

The answer is borderline. Traditionally, the meat is not seared in the classical Moroccan tradition but the CC is willing to bet a substantial amount of money that this is the way that true geniuses make the dish even while avowing the technique. Ultimately, it's the end that matters and the end is scrumptious!

Chicken Tagine with Preserved Lemons & Green Olives

(serves 4)

Ingredients

4 chicken thighs
1 large onion (grated)

2 preserved lemons
2 cups green olives (pitted)
1/2 cup parsley (finely chopped)
1/2 cup cilantro (finely chopped)

1 tbsp. coriander seeds
1 1/2 tbsp. cumin seeds
1 tbsp. whole black pepper
1/2 tbsp. dried ginger
1/2 tbsp. sweet paprika

large pinch of saffron

2 cups chicken broth

salt
3 tbsp. duck fat

Recipe

Dry roast the coriander, cumin and black pepper in a skillet and grind them finely in a coffee grinder. Combine with the dried ginger, sweet paprika and saffron and set aside.

Prepare the preserved lemons. Discard the innards retaining only the skin. It will peel off easily. Chop in to strips about 1" long. This means first chop them length-wise into thin strips and then halve them. Set aside.

For the olives, there are two schools of thought. Those that prefer them left whole and those that halve them length-wise. The CC is mystified why the world would be so divided (pun intended!) since it makes so little difference to the end result but as the Japanese might say, 十人十色 ("ten people, ten colors" = "different strokes for different folks").

In a flat pan, heat up the duck fat and fry the chicken thighs until they are lightly browned on both sides. Roughly 10 minutes. Lift out and set aside. Discard the fat.

Meanwhile grate the onion with a box grater. Set aside.

Assemble the tagine.

Combine the grated onions, salt, broth, and the spices and put them in the tagine. Add the chicken. Cover it and let it cook at the lowest possible heat for 35 minutes. (The chicken should be very tender at this point.)

Add the preserved lemons, olives, the two greens and combine.

You can let it sit at this point and reheat gently in the tagine when your guests arrive.

Serve over couscous. (Recipe below.)

Couscous with Chickpeas, Raisins & Scallions

(serves 4 generously)

Ingredients

2 cups couscous

1/2 cup chickpeas
1 cup raisins
2 scallions

2 tbsp. cultured butter
2 1/2 cups water

salt

Recipe

The CC is perfectly aware of the fact that, theoretically speaking, couscous should be steamed but you can't get that kind of couscous even in New York so you live with the brute reality that you have on the ground.

Cook the chickpeas ahead of time. They need to be al dente.

Add all the ingredients to a pot except the couscous and bring to a boil. Add the couscous and turn the heat off. Wait 5 minutes. Fluff it to get perfectly cooked couscous.

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† The Mallard is a wild duck which makes the pun with Maillard all too irresistible.

Why Does My Kitchen Get Dirty?

For most people the answer to the question would be because they cook a lot and it splatters.

To which the CC would just ask the logical followup, "So why does it splatter in the first place?"

"Just because," is not really an answer. It's a cop-out saying "I don't know but I think I have the illusion that I do."

"Why does it splatter in the first place?"

We are going to get down to fundamentals because that's just the way the CC rolls.

A more practical reason is once you understand the "mechanism of splatter", you are going to be better equipped in cleaning your kitchen or getting your kitchen cleaned, whatever the case may be.

There are a few mechanisms of splatter and they are all very different because they work via vastly different principles.

The first and most obvious one is that people drop stuff on the floor. Nobody is perfect and while prepping food or cooking it, stuff will drop. It's even worse when there are dishes that are time critical. There's no time to pause and mop up the floor.

The second and more subtle reason is that when you are either pan-frying or frying you are really removing moisture via a precise process. The interaction of steam and oil which are immiscible turns the oil into a fine aerosol which because of the heat will rise in the air typically to a height of about 6-12 feet. When it cools off, it will rain down in miniscule droplets which are too fine to even see. If  your kitchen has air movement of any sort or a draft, these droplets will travel at a height before they cool off enough to rain down.

(For those of you who wear glasses, there is a simple empirical test to demonstrate this. After you have finished frying, touch the inside of your glasses. It will be oily because the aerosol has rained down from above into the gap. If it were just splattering directly the inside would be absolutely clean.)

This is not the only problem. The aerosol tends to be highly ionized and will attract ionic molecules. Dust tends to be ionic for many complex reasons so these microscopic splatters will attract the neighboring dust to them where they will cluster. When it gets large enough, you will notice it as being "dirty".

(This is the same reason that your television, computer screen, computer fans, electronic equipment, get disproportionately dusty. They are attracting ionic dust  because the surfaces are mildly ionized themselves. In the case of computer hardware, highly ionized.)

The third common reason is that of the bubbling of a sauce (think: tomato sauce). When the viscosity of a sauce gets really thick, the water is trying to escape in the form of steam but the sauce is so thick that it doesn't allow the tiny bubbles to rise to the surface. They form lots of tiny bubbles internally which coalesce inside the sauce to form a large bubble. The large bubble can counteract the density of the sauce and rises to the top. When this large bubble pops at the surface, it splatters the sauce all over. Generally, these sauces are easy to clean which is why experienced cooks just do a quick clean right after they finish unlike the oil splatters which are so tiny as to be practically invisible. It also helps to keep the sauce bubbling at a lower speed.

Experienced chefs also use splatter screens although the CC will be the first to point out that they are not always practical and not always applicable to certain styles of dishes.

Armed with this knowledge, go forth and cook! (and clean!)

The Fetishization of Seasonal and Local

One of the great tragedies of the culinary world is that it is not only faddish but also completely ignorant of science, history, economics, and the mechanics of trade.

In an ideal world, we would all eat seasonal and local but it's not an ideal world. For starters, there are 7+ billion people in the world and they can't all eat locally. An increasing amount of the world's population lives in cities so it is literally impossible that everyone in the city eat locally. It's just a simple mathematical argument about the population versus the amount of arable space and the steepness of its value. (The value comes from the fact that the population provides steep "value" on the economic food chain.)

Simple economics argues against it. The crux of a modern city — and by modern we have to understand that this is at least 500+ years old — is upwardly-mobile cheap labor. The desire to have a better life propels the cheap labor into the cities in the first place. The idea that these people can eat "local" is risible beyond the extreme. If cheap labor propels cities then by definition, it's cheap food that propels the cheapness of the labor.

So cheap means invoking Ricardo's principle of comparative advantage. Source the produce from wherever labor is cheapest and that means Africa, Asia and South America.

Seasonal is another bugaboo.

Places that have absurdly short growing seasons (think: Japan, Korea, Russia, Poland) rely to an unprecedented degree on pickled salted food.

Before World War II, Japan had the highest rate of stomach cancer in the world. It was so high as to be a routine tear-jerker movie cliché most memorably exploited by Kurosawa in his masterpiece Ikiru (生きる). It was definitely due to a heavy reliance on salted, smoked, and nitrate- and nitrite-rich foods (cured meats), the heavy incidence of the bacterium H. Pylori which thrives in stomachs with heavy salt diets, heavy tobacco usage, and above all, the lack of fresh vegetables for all but the briefest of growing seasons.

The same happened in Korea, Russia, and most of Eastern Europe. The common factor is the "short growing season" which means a reliance on "pickled foods".

Compare with both China and India where in spite of the heavy smoking and an equally important pickling tradition, the vegetable-rich diet traditionally traveling along trade routes had stomach cancer incidences at de minimus levels.

This is not just speculation. We have evidence for this.

After World War II, when vegetables flooded the Japanese markets thanks to free trade, the rate of stomach cancer plummeted precipitously. (Even then today, it's still 4x the rate in the UK!)

Do we really want to go "seasonal" so that we can go back to these bad old days?

To rephrase, going non-local caused stomach cancer rates around the world to plummet. Is this a bad thing?

Seasonal and local are not bad things.

For one, the seasonal component gives you an extreme rush of excitement. There's an anticipation to looking forward to something pleasurable that won't come around for another six months. There's also the fact that seasonal actually means cheap. Whatever is plentiful is cheap by the simple laws of supply and demand.

Local is a good thing too.

You can talk to the farmer. You can actually ask for something that lies outside the norm and since you are there to pay for it, they will do it. (Try doing that at a supermarket!)

What's wrong is the fetish. The hide-bound rules that don't allow for five thousand years of trading history (think: spices!), and science (think: stomach cancer) and a certain flexibility of both thought and process. A certain give and take (trade pun intended!) in the approach to food and markets.

Why not have a rich understanding of the subject and the best of both worlds?

Colored Cauliflowers

Recently more and more of the colored cauliflowers have started showing up at the farmers' market so the CC started doing some research on them. They are genetically-modified cauliflowers.

The CC is not afraid of the genetic modification because it has been going on forever. The "organic granolas" put scare-quotes around the "genetic" part but it's part of our legacy. We've been doing this since the birth of agriculture. Cross-breeding to get sweeter varieties or more hardy ones or ones that are more resistant to various pests and fungi.

Carrots were not originally "orange". They were cultivated specifically to appeal to the Dutch House of Orange and in return they became the "Royal Vegetable". They were also markedly sweeter which explains why they became the dominant variety.


The story of the colored cauliflowers is as varied as their colors:

The orange cauliflower was a genetic mutant first found in Canada in 1970. It was crossbred using conventional cross-breeding techniques at Cornell University until it now finds its way into the mainstream. The orange comes from beta-carotene — the same compound that gives carrots its characteristic color and which is absolutely necessary for humans to produce Vitamin A.

The purple cauliflower was a similar mutant found in Denmark in the 1980's. Same idea of cross-breeding. The purple comes from anthocyanins (also found in raspberries, blueberries, grapes, red wine, olives.) They are water soluble so if you want to preserve the color, you will need to gently roast it not boil it or steam it. It has a very characteristic smell when you cut into it and it's a lot milder in flavor than the others.

The green one is a cross-breed between broccoli and cauliflower. There is also the Romanesco cauliflower but that's a different breed.

A classic recipe is presented for your benefit.

Pasta with Cauliflower, Anchovies, Raisins, Pine Nuts & Saffron

Ingredients

2 cups rigatoni (or penne.)

1 head cauliflower (separated into medium-sized florets)
1 large red onion (chopped)
1/2 cup pine nuts
1/2 cup raisins
6 anchovies (preferably salt-cured)
2 tbsp tomato paste
1 tsp saffron

olive oil

sea salt
black pepper

1/3 cup grated parmigiano-reggiano

breadcrumbs


Recipe

Toast the breadcrumbs and set aside. Toast the pine nuts until golden. Be careful not to burn them. Set aside.

Heat an oven to 400°F and roast the cauliflower florets for 15 minutes.

Heat the olive oil at medium heat. When shimmering, add the onions and fry for a further 7-9 minutes. Add the tomato paste, and the anchovies and fry. The anchovies will "dissolve" as they fry. Add a cup of water, the raisins, sea salt, and black pepper, and let cook at low heat.

Meanwhile make the pasta until al dente. Drain.

The cauliflower mixture should be just slightly on the wet side. If dry, add some more water.

Toss in the saffron, cauliflowers and the pasta, and mix thoroughly.

Serve with the parmesan and roasted breadcrumbs on top with extra black pepper to taste.

Let's Bolt Out of Here

Have you ever had a lettuce and it was slightly bitter?

It's been "bolting".

No, the CC is not making this term up. It seems to be standard terminology in the horticultural world.

Bolting is the plants' attempt to produce seeds, flower and reproduce.

Once plants have bolted, there's no going back because it's just a fact that they just want to flower and reproduce whereas we want to eat them. They turn bitter because it's a first-line defense against predators including humans who most certainly are exactly that.

There's a general tendency of humans to buy larger produce. More bang for the unit buck and all that but you'd be better served to pick smaller varieties that haven't yet bolted out of town.

Cooking Myths (Part 3)

This one's a doozy because it goes against all logic.

Apparently, when you steam mussels, clams or oysters, the ones that don't open should be discarded.

This defies science and logic.

Dead clams are obvious to spot. They are open and they stink. In fact, a closed clam is a healthy one because it's still alive.

When you steam them, you are in fact, killing them.

Clams, oysters, mussels – they don't possess a nervous system like mammals that feels pain so for all those vegetarians given to furious and fervent anthropomorphism, this is not unlike steaming spinach. You are killing the spinach too when you steam it and it too feels no pain!

The ones that don't open are the healthiest of them all since they are resistant. A few additional minutes of steaming always does the job.

So people prefer tossing out the best clams for the dubious ones? Sounds pretty fuckin' irrational to the CC!

Frying

This January, one of the CC's friend's mother got burnt while trying to fry something. She was not hurt. It was more distress than trauma, thankfully.

Since we here at this blog tend towards the analytic bent of mind, it behooves the CC to explain what went wrong.

Let us take a quick detour into what cooking actually does. Cooking transforms substances that may or may not be edible in their raw form into edible ones in the presence of heat^†.

The mechanism of heat transfer matters of course.

If you boil something, by definition, the temperature at the surface of the boiled object can never go higher than the boiling point of water (= 100°C.) With both baking and frying, you can go to temperatures that are a lot higher.

There is a second technical difference. When you boil something, you can't really "lose" water. The cellular structures may burst and release water but you have water all around you. There's nowhere for the water to go. Comparatively, in both baking and frying, the water content of the burst cells is lost in the form of steam.

Once you understand this, you begin to realize why baking and frying have a lot more in common than is obvious. This is why many "low-fat" cookbooks substitute baking for frying.

It's a buncha bollocks though.

They are emphatically not the same — a proposition that is trivially verifiable by simple tasting. The CC doesn't believe that anyone in the entire history of mankind has ever mistaken a deep-fried food for a baked one and vice-versa, claims to the contrary not-withstanding.

Why would that be?

In baking, you are using air to transfer the heat. In frying, you are using hot oil.

The oil enters the surface of the burst cell and stays there. Ditto for the air. You can blot the oil out using paper towels but you can never remove it completely. The fat has flavor and the CC seriously doubts that anyone has ever confused the taste of fat with that of air.

To recap so far, frying is a precise mechanism of dessication (= removing moisture from food) in the presence of high heat with oil as the medium of transfer.

Now, let's dig into the precise mechanics. We will use the humble potato chip as the example.

When you put a chip into the fryer, the cells on the surface are heated to a temperature that is a lot higher than 100°C. The water in the cells heats up, converts to steam and expands; it bursts the cellular wall structures which are not rigid enough to hold it in, and enters the oil. Oil and water are immiscible and so the steam rapidly exits by rising to the surface.

The bubbles you see when you add food to hot oil is steam escaping the system.

After all the water is gone, you have a solid suspended in a medium of high heat but with no water to give up. This is the second phase and it works exactly like baking. You have a hot surface and a solid and you get a classic Maillard reaction going.

This is why you need to fry "past the point of the bubbles". This is also why there is similarity between baking and frying in the first place. (The difference, of course, is that a small amount of oil has entered the burst surface cellular structures in frying.)

Everyone with the CC so far? Onwards we go!

What happens to a more complex object? An arancini, for example. (Leftover risotto with a surface of egg and breadcrumbs.)

A large object cannot heat up very quickly. This is just Laplace's equation in practice. The surface rapidly turns crisp while the interior stays "moist" because the temperature never hits the steam point.

Experienced Sicilian housewives make "large" arancini whereas johnny-come-lately's try to dry out the rice. They are not playing the same game. (You can easily figure out the losers.)

Welcome to the platonic ideal of frying!

The surface must be crisp but the interior still moist since that is what humans desire.

This is also why fried foods are best eaten fresh. Laplace's equation tells you that the interior will continue to cook even when you pull the object out of the fryer because the surface is still at a very high temperature and air is a terrible conductor of heat. The heat is mostly going inwards. The interior temperature eventually hits 100°C; it generates steam and the fried object turns "soggy".

What happens when you have a very small soggy object possibly with some air pockets?

The outside has crisped up and the object is small enough that the interior has hit 100°C so steam is being generated. The air pockets expand dangerously and the pressure makes the object burst. The internal water hits the oil along with the burst air and you get an explosion of dangerously hot oil.

That is what happened to the CC's friend's mom.

If you fry a small object in hot oil, you must as a matter of necessity compress it using your hands to have absolutely no air pockets. You also need to control the size v/s moisture. It's a pretty subtle game.

Amateurs need not apply. Demonstrably, experience without theory means nothing.

To sum up, experienced chefs do one of the following:

• Pre-dessicate the object either naturally or artificially.
• Fry a largish object with a dry surface and wet interior^‡.
• Fry a small object with a dry surface and wet interior which has no air pockets naturally^§.
• Fry a small object with a dry surface and only barely moist interior which has no air pockets by design at a much higher temperature (= faster.)

There are no other choices.

Once you understand this, the tricks start making sense.

Ever wonder why potato chips stay crispy for days but fried food turns "soggy"?

The chips are so thin they have given up all their moisture but traditional fried food still has a ton of water in it.

Ever wonder why you are told that the oil must be piping hot before you fry anything?

The answer is that the interior shouldn't heat up. You want the surface to dessicate and Maillard-ify (to invent a verb) but the interior must not hit 100°C.

Every wonder why experienced chefs "double-fry" french-fries after sticking them in the fridge after round one?

Once you pre-cook and stick in the fridge you have done two things. You have dessicated the surface and cooled off the fries. When you drop them the second time in boiling oil, you get the crisp surface but the interior which is now quite cold will not hit the steam point. The fries will be crisp on the outside and moist on the inside.

There is no magic. There has never been magic. There will never be any magic.

Technique has always mattered at the highest level but what really matters is the science behind the technique.

---

† Raw spinach is technically poisonous. You'd have to eat a lot to find out though.
‡ e.g. arancini.
§ e.g. french fries.

Cooking Myths (Part 3)

It sometimes surprises people to know that a tightly-packed refrigerator or freezer is actually much more energy efficient than a loosely-packed one.

It shouldn't be so surprising. Air has almost no thermal capacity. We've discussed that in the context of an oven but the same principle applies to a freezer.

The things that keep the insides cold are actually the walls and the food and beverage items.

That's why a packed freezer will stay cold for a long time during a power outage.

So if you have a packed fridge like the CC, you can pat yourself for being more energy-efficient.

Would You Rather Be a Fruit or a Vegetable?

Humans are a fairly omnivorous species.

We eat roots and tubers, stems and stalks, leaves, flowers, seaweeds, and fungii and call them all vegetables.

We also eat fruits.

Most interestingly, we eat some fruits and call them vegetables^†.

A substantial reason for this is the United States Supreme Court decision from 1893 in the matter of Nix v. Hedden. And like all momentous events in the United States, it all comes down to a matter of taxation.

The Tariff Act of 1883 required a tax to be paid on imported vegetables but not fruit. The "intuitive" notion, which of course is not the botanical notion, was that fruits were sweet and were "mostly eaten as is" and vegetables were not and were "cooked".

It all came down to a matter of dueling dictionaries.

Common parlance^‡ won and the tomato "became" a vegetable!

† tomatoes, eggplant, bell peppers, chillis, tomatillo, squashes, cucumber, legumes, peas, avocado, corn, okra and olives.

‡ If you really want to freak your vegetarian friends out, when you're eating fruit, be sure to say loudly, "Mmmmmmmmmm ... tasty ripe ovaries!" (because that's what they actually are!)

Cooking Myths (Part 3)

There seems to be pervasive myth that if you remove the seeds from a green chilli then it loses its heat.

Except that all the heat of a chilli is in the skin not the seeds.

Remove them for aesthetic reasons but don't be under any delusion that you are reducting the heat quotient!

The Thermodynamics of Tagines

Tagines work like closed nuclear cooling towers. The purpose of the hyperboloid cover is to cool the evaporating liquid and recycle it back slowly into the cooking pot thus allowing it to cook at a low temperature in the barest of liquid.

This also has the advantage of having the meat, vegetables or fish cook in their own broth. The broth is extracted from the underlying ingredients, turned into steam which condenses and drops back down. You get an intensely brothy liquid since the entire system is "sealed" for all practical purposes.

The heat supply from the flame is kept intentionally low. This is basically a very efficient braise with the heat coming from below rather than all around. It's very heat efficient compared to a traditional braise since you are not wasting time heating an oven where air is actually a very poor conductor of heat. Important for a culture where fuel was traditionally a very large expense.

Ancient science figured out empirically but actually quite amazing!

Making Lemonade Out of Lemons

If you find yourself with a bunch of slightly hard lemons, you aren't going to be able to ripen them since they are not climacteric fruits but there's still something you can do about squeezing juice out of them.

Just stick them in the freezer for an hour or two while they freeze. Pull them out, de-freeze, and they will yield a ton of juice without a lot of effort.

What's the reason?

The water content inside the cellular walls turns into ice shards which in turn puncture the cellular walls breaking down the structure. When unfrozen the walls are ready to give up the juices much more easily.

Elementary, my dear readers!

What Nonna can learn from Obaasan!

The recipe for spaghetti with clams is justifiably a classic.

However, there's a subtle way in which it can be improved, and we have the Japanese to thank for that.

The classic Italian (or French) way is to dump all the clams in, toss in some wine, and let them steam. Fish them out as they open, and then reduce the broth to get it to its logical clamminess.

The classic Japanese way improves on this in many many ways. It's subtle and it works because it interleaves the two steps to make it all better.

The CC first learnt about this trick when he was making asari gohan — an elementally simple dish of clams served over rice. Very simple and eminently suitable for a day when only a simple home-cooked meal will do.

When he first read the instructions, he was a little mystified but decided to follow them anyway. The logic of the procedure jumped out with such immense force that he realized rapidly that it would enable him to take his Italian clam recipes to the next level.

The trick is very very simple.

Instead of steaming the clams all at once, we are going to steam them in batches. Typically 3-4 batches depending on the number of clams. The idea is that each batch not just steams in the previous clam's broth but that the broth reduces at the same time so that there is very little wastage of time. What seems at first like "taking longer" is actually a very clever way of combining the two steps. Each batch steams, opens up, and releases the juices. Meanwhile the next batch steams while the previous clam broth reduces itself.

The moral must be that even Italian grandmas, as talented as they are, have something to learn from the rest of the world.

Water

There are three properties of water that make it unique.

Every single one of these properties is used in every single cuisine so it helps to understand how things work.

Water is a polar molecule.

Water may be H₂O but the two hydrogen atoms are attached at a 109.5° angle. This polarizes the water molecule because there is more positive charge on one side (H₂⁺) rather than the other (O^-.)

This means water can dissolve polar molecules. Specifically, any salt.

Most importantly, the salts will be split into their ionized components when dissolved because the positive ions will be attracted to the negative portion of the water molecule (O^-) and the negative ions to the positive portion (H₂⁺.)

Water has a very high boiling point.

Water is a very small molecule. However, compared to molecules of its size, it has an absurdly high boiling point. This is due to its polar nature. Water molecules naturally attract each other and it's quite hard to separate them. That's also why the phase transitions (ice → water, water → steam) take so much heat.

Water has a very high specific heat.

This just means that water can hold a tremendous amount of heat i.e. it has a high thermal capacity.

Heat is just the average energy of motion of a molecule.

This is a tricky point so it requires some explanation.

Whenever a molecule is symmetric, its bonds restrict a certain degree of vibration along the bonds because too much movement would break the bonds.

So a linear molecule is restricted in its motion along the line. If you had a molecule symmetric in two directions, its motion would be restricted in the plane but it could still rotate along both axes.

Water is so asymmetric that all three rotational degrees of freedom are possible as well as vibrating along both bonds, and perpendicular to them, and none of them break up the molecule so it can absorb energy to "spin" in three directions, and "vibrate" in three as well. Hence, it can absorb a lot of energy to "move".

Most importantly, it's the smallest molecule that has this property.

Cooking Myths (Part 2)

This series has been dormant for a couple of years but it's time to resurrect it.

One of the pervasive myths about baking is that opening the oven door makes the temperature drop "drastically".

The fact that the temperature drops is not in doubt. What's in question is the "drastic" part.

Let's start with the basics.

Air has very little thermal capacity. It's ability to hold heat is minimal if that. That's precisely why you can put your hand in a 500°F oven and not feel a thing.

Just so we are clear on this concept, try sticking your hand in 212°F water (a.k.a. boiling water) and see how you feel. It's a lot less than 500°F!!!

So what exactly holds the heat of the oven?

It's actually the walls and the floor. They have a high thermal capacity. In fact, if you want to increase the thermal capacity, you should put in a very large steel plate on the bottom of the oven, or a ton of bricks, and run the oven for a long time.

The air is largely irrelevant!

Defending Molecular Gastronomy

The CC is aware that the world shits upon this stuff on general purpose in the name of "tradition". The CC could argue at length about why this is wrong but there's a far simpler way of arguing.

Take flaked salt, and mix it with fine olive oil.

Slice tomatoes, and drizzle the above mixture over it. Add strips of basil.

Salt is a polarized molecule. It will not dissolve in non-polarized liquids like oil. That means the crunchy salt will still remain crunchy, and not dissolve in the tomato's watery juices nor will it make the tomato "sweat".

You can use your finest fleur de sel this way, and it will work. The reason it works is science.

You haven't seen this in any book you own because they simply didn't get it.

If this were so obvious, why is this not there in Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, and the zillion others that make a fetish out of tomatoes, olive oil, and salt?

Why is this not present in four hundred years of Italian tradition?

So, fuck you, "tradition"!

Tradition, which can be useful can also be rank superstition. It's done this way, why, well because it has always been done this way. Kinda silly sometimes.

Facts and evidence (= science) matter more.