Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Blinding Flash of the Obvious

Don't read food blogs (including your own) when you are hungry!
Posted by ShockingSchadenfreude at Wednesday, July 01, 2009
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4 comments:

Marcus said...

How else will I know what to eat?!

Ok, simple recipe/cooking tip. Not up to the standards of the Crazy Chef but good anyway and quick/easy for an after-work dinner...

Wife and I made spaghetti, just used sauce from a jar. Boiled some dried porcini's and added them to the sauce along with some ground beef (browned, salt/pepper/garlic). Used the mushroom broth (along with additional water) to boil the noodles (heavily salted ala alton brown/CC/that other guy who CC says is the king of the whole salt thing).

The broth added a lot of flavor to the noodles. I put the noodles/sauce in a dish and topped with some moz and baked the whole thing. Turned out really good imo.

While I appreciate a different approach, often it seems the CC recipes are a bit involved (for me) to do for an after-work, quick meal. I thought this was an easy way to add a lot of flavor to a common meal the avg person might make and so present it for your consideration.

12:43 AM
ShockingSchadenfreude said...

While I grant that the salt gave you a serious boost, you really need to read these posts about umami.

Please read every single one. Once again, read them ALL!!!

It was the porcinis actually. The salt is needed to split the ions.

10:32 PM
Marcus said...

Yeah I guess I was unclear...it was the porcinis (thats the "broth" I was referring to). Good flavor and easy to do.

11:36 AM
ShockingSchadenfreude said...

Here's a post written a few years about about scaring up a meal.

The triumvirate of tomatoes, porcinis and parm are giving you umami off the charts!

The beef and the mozarella (as opposed to the parm in the other recipe) are giving you isosinates to interact with the glutamates from the tomato and the guanylates from the porcinis.

Just the description plus the umami logic tells me that it's not terribly surprising that it was really good!

12:19 PM

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