Cooking Myths (Part 3)

Another cooking myth is that bread is done when you pull it out of the oven.

As any good baker would know this is patently false.

This is a simple consequence of the classical heat equation (bet you weren't counting on partial differential equations showing up on this blog, huh?)

Heat flows from stuff of higher temperature to that of lower temperature.

In the oven, heat flows into the bread because the oven is hotter than the dough.

As you pull the bread out of the oven, the heat starts flowing out of the bread into the ambient air. Frequently, the very center of the bread may be cooler than its surroundings, and heat will keep flowing towards it as well. Consequently, the bread is still "cooking", and experienced bakers know to hold themselves away until the bread equalizes with the temperature outside.

Experienced bakers know that good bread will "crackle" as it cools down. The bread is contracting from being cooled and the strands of gluten are snapping as the bread contracts. Which releases even more aromatic molecules of smell.

That's what makes fresh bread irresistible but you must resist for a while before the bread has cooled down. (Otherwise, you get to eat a lumpy doughy mess.)

It's one of the sad truths of life — instantaneous gratification is a very bad thing in the world of fresh bread!

Arto der Haroutunian

A uniquely intense writer who was an architect, really wanted to be a musician but loved food so much that he became a cookbook writer.

He was Armenian but the family lived in Syria and Lebanon, and moved to post-war England with all its deprivations and seventh-rate produce.

It is easy enough to scoff about ingredients in these food-crazy times but dial back about half a century and life was not so easy. You could forget about zucchini and arugula, and fenugreek and fresh turmeric might as well have been fantasies for the average cook.

It was in this environment that the author wrote these books.

He was a polymath and the intensity leaps off every page. The cross-connections between cuisines are made entirely organically (and correctly!) and the sheer encyclopaedic knowledge shines through.

The cookbooks are primarily concerned with the Mediterranean but they leap as far ashore as Mongolia and India when the logical connection between dishes is needed.

The author died tragically young but he authored twelve cookbooks only four of which are easily available.

You can't go wrong with any of them, and these days you will no longer have to make any substitutions. (The author is careful in stating the original first, and the substitution second. It's only the substitutions that make the books dated.)

This is home cooking of the most elevated kind. There are no duds here!!!

And most of all, the author's intense engagement with every aspect of the cooking process both physical and intellectual shines through.

What more could one ask?

Squid-Ink Risotto

If you've never had it, this is one of the foods of the gods.


Recipe

2 cup vialone nano rice
3 shallots
4 cloves garlic
2 dried red chillies (crumbled fine)
2 squids (cleaned, cut into rounds)
2 tbsp squid ink

1 cup white wine
6 tomatoes (pulped with a food mill)
4 cups broth

3 tbsp thyme (substitute with rosemary)

olive oil
black pepper
sea salt

4 tbsp parsley (chopped, for garnish)

Ingredients

The recipe follows along the lines of a standard risotto with a few kinks.

Keep the broth on a simmer in a separate vessel.

Fry the shallots and the garlic in olive oil at a medium heat. Add the rice, and fry to make sure that each grain is coated in the olive oil. Add plenty of ground pepper, the red chillies and the salt. Add the white wine to deglaze, and stir. Add a ladle of hot broth along with the tomato puree. Bring to a boil stirring constantly. Add the squid ink.

The mixture will turn instantly from a pale red to a deep dark inky black. Keep adding ladlefuls of broth stirring constantly. Add the thyme/rosemary towards the end. Just before you are ready to serve, add the cleaned squid, and take the pot off the heat. (You don't want to overcook the squid.)

Serve immediately sprinkled with parsley preferably with a steely white wine.

Baking Resumption

After a long hiatus, the CC has started baking again.

This is Jim Lahey's famous (infamous?) No-Knead Bread, and yes, it's exactly as amazing at it always was.

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!

The Larder

The CC is frequently asked how he cooks all the stuff he does, and the answer is a vast larder.

No, the CC doesn't live in a massive space. It takes considerable ingenuity of means to keep such a larder stocked and piled.

Living in New York doesn't hurt.

The CC's does the inventory in his head, as a consequence, and there's always something interesting for dinner.

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.

Making Babies

Making preserved lemons is like having a baby.

You have to periodically burp them.

Awwwwww, so cute.

Seaweed

One of the great glories of Japanese cuisine is their consumption of edible seaweeds.

They consume at least seven kinds but there are four that you must actually understand well.

Seaweeds contain very high amounts of iodine, calcium and magnesium. You don't really need iodized salt (which sucks anyway!) if you consume these things on a regular basis. (In fact, you can smell the "sea" in them which is a mixture of iodine and calcium compounds.)

The first, and arguably the most important is kombu. The CC has spoken about it extensively here. It is absolutely indispensable in the pursuit of umami.

The next up, in no particular order of importance is nori. If you've eaten sushi, you will recognize this one. It's the crisp wrapper that is used to enclose rice. It's paper-thin, and when toasted gives off this wonderful aroma.

Then there's hijiki. It has this wonderfully crisp/slippery texture that is impossible to describe. Crisp and slippery? You'll just have to try it for yourself.

Finally, there's wakame. You may have had it in miso soup but this is a tougher nut to crack (so to speak.) You really have to appreciate its slippery texture because it's all about the texture here.

One of the great beauties of seaweed is that it comes dried. Effectively, that means that in a cool, dry pantry, it will last forever. (Not that it does in the CC's house but anyway ...)

You need to rehydrate three of them (nori is consumed as is) and you need to know the timings involved. They need to be rehydrated in cold water because hot water will decompose them, and make them, well, unappetizing.

We've already talked about kombu. Thirty minutes in cold water, followed by a boil but it needs to be yanked out just before the water boils or else the dashi will turn bitter.

Hijiki requires about 30 minutes of rehydation in cold water. Wakame requires only about 5 minutes.

These are wonderfully glorious objects. Masterpieces of texture and taste.

Souring Agents

One of the most important tricks in the chef's repertoire is the deployment of sour tastes.

It's extraordinarily underused and the CC doesn't understand why.

In fact, the CC will argue that this idea is so important and so undeveloped that it should be better known. (The CC will probably regret this when he gets old. Perhaps you shouldn't give away all of your best ideas?)

The dynamic use of sour ingredients is the lynchpin in nailing the entirely desirable "wanna-eat-more" feeling.


It's not unknown — it's common to Indian street food, and Japanese cooking. It's well known to both Moroccan food, and Thai cuisine. It's actually the key idea that distinguishes Filipino food with its "hit-me-again" taste.

Why is so underutilized then? The CC stays mystified.

Humans are conditioned to eat slightly acidic foods. In fact, from an evolutionary perspective, substances that contain alkaline substances naturally (e.g. alkaloids) tend, on a general basis, to be highly poisonous. That's why soap tastes "bad". It's an evolutionary response to ensure avoidance of dangerous things.

(On a side note, that's why sweet tastes good instinctively to babies. It's an evolutionary response to fruits which are safe for consumption.)


Most chefs will tell you that they use two tricks. One is surface salt which the CC has talked about here extensively.

The other is the use of sour ingredients which "brighten" the flavor, and bring into sharp relief the other flavors that are being used.

Try it. You'll thank the CC later.