Hellas! Tragœdia

It would be quite hard to see the effect of the Greek collapse (and resulting Depression) in the canyons of Wall St. but it can easily be seen in the Greek stores in Astoria.

There is a wonderful store called Titan Foods. It's one of the largest Greek supermarkets in New York.

The collapse of the Greek economy has taken out a large portion of their supply chain. The CC having gone to this store for more than ten years can easily see the impact that it is having on the market.

Normally, the store would be groaning under the weight of all kinds of Greek goodies but you can see the strain.

Still the CC came back with some anchovies packed in salt, spanakopita, karidopita (walnut cake), taramosalata, yogurt, sheep-milk feta, and other assorted ingredients.

Ginataang Hipon

This is a superb Filipino dish. The CC has already written about it before.

Like all cuisines, it lives and dies upon the excellence of its ingredients.


Ingredients

2 fresh bamboo shoots
1/2 lb long beans (chopped into 2" segments)
1 cup corn
1/4 cup chilli leaves

2 cups coconut milk
2 tbsp patis

16 fresh shrimp (peeled)

Notes about ingredients

You can find fresh bamboo shoots and long beans at any Chinese grocery store. You can find the chilli leaves at a Filipino store or you can just pick your own if you have a chilli plant.

Patis is Filipino-style fish sauce. Use the Thai nahm pla as a substitute but be warned that they are similar but not the same. (The CC can effortlessly tell the difference in a recipe!) If all fails, bung in a crushed salted anchovy because that's what the fish sauce is actually doing.

Use frozen corn if it's not summer. These days coconut milk comes from a can. The CC would rather you make your own but do what you have to.

Fresh shrimp is non-negotiable.

Recipe

NOTE: You don't need salt in this recipe because of the patis. Just taste it and add some if needed.

The bamboo shoots must be sliced really thin using a mandoline.

Combine the shoots, long beans, corn and coconut milk and heat gently for about 10-12 minutes. Be careful because if you boil the coconut milk it will curdle.

Add the shrimp and chilli leaves and cook for just under a minute.

Serve with rice.

Little House on the Prairie

It's that time of the year again.

Thirty-five pounds of tomatoes (!) slowly cooking down to make tomato paste and sauce.

February holds no terrors any more.

Court Bouillon

It's French for "short broth" as in broth that is cooked for a short amount of time and it's the kind of thing that separates truly committed cooks from rank amateurs.

The idea is simple. Simmer a bunch of aromatic ingredients for a relatively short amount of time (compared to making real broth) so as to get a light delicate flavorful liquid.

You would see this most often used to poach fish but you can use it for a variety of uses including making a béchamel that will knock your socks off.

The effort required to make it is minimal and the results disproportionately amazing.

The recipe is far from set in stone. You can twist it and turn it in many directions based on what you want to achieve but the basic rules stay the same - a mass of aromatic vegetables and spices are cooked in water and wine for a "brief" bit and then filtered. Fennel seeds work wonders with fish. You can add cloves or garlic if you want a spicier broth. There is considerably leeway here.

The word "brief" deserves an explanation. Classical stock-making takes a few hours and even with the advent of the pressure cooker as we have seen still takes a lot of effort. By comparison, this is brief. Roughly 30 minutes.

In this hectic age of ours, this may seem like an eternity in what is but a prelude to the real recipe but you can have a nice de-stressing glass of wine while the broth makes itself.

An important point for lazy cooks (aren't we all?) — you don't need to peel the carrots or the onions. Just wash them and chop them quickly. You aren't going to be eating them and the skin adds flavor to the product. Win-win as they say.

Ingredients

1 onion (finely chopped)
1 carrot (finely chopped)
1 stalk celery (finely chopped)

1 cup white wine
3 cups water

1 tbsp. black peppercorns
1 tsp. fennel seeds
3 bay leaves

1 sprig rosemary
stems of parsley (if you have them)

salt

Recipe

Dump all the ingredients in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and let it simmer for about 20 minutes. Skim any foam that comes to the surface. Strain through a fine mesh retaining the liquid.

Early Morning Haul

The CC was up at the crack of dawn to haul back the goodies like a pack mule.

Corn, onions, garlic, zucchini, sweet peppers, clams, cod, tomatoes, more tomatoes, basil, sage, rosemary.

Tomato-Fest

A friend's going away party. Naturally, it's tomato-time!

Prosciutto with Medjool dates
♥
Purple Russian tomatoes with olive oil & fleur de sel
♥
Pasta with anchovies, cranberry beans & tomato sauce

Bon voyage!

Sharks on the Subway

Various news media report: Shark found on New York subway.

The hyperbole continues:

A dead shark has been discovered on the subway in New York City, transport officials have confirmed. The unlikely passenger, about 1.2m (4ft) long, was found under a row of seats on a Queens-bound train.

Isvett Verde, of Brooklyn, New York, who took a photo of the shark, said she noticed that the empty carriage of the N train "smelled extremely fishy" when she boarded at 8th Street.

"It's hard to be surprised as there are always crazy things happening in this city, but even that was a bit much," she told the BBC.

Any good chef would know that it's a spiny dogfish.

It's edible, plentiful and some passenger was probably carrying it back home. The CC has eaten it at plenty a Venezuelan restaurant in Queens but "sharks on the subway" is so much more sensational.

BORING!!!

Pistachio Soup

This unusual soup is an Iranian Jewish recipe.

It's best served cold and it's even better the second day. You can make it elegant and smooth or leave it with a slightly grainy texture. Both are delightful.

The best part is you can make it ahead of time, and when a heat wave strikes like in New York right now, there's nothing like an ice-cold slurp of deliciousness to cool you down.

A couple of warnings:

The soup's tastes and textures do not come "alive" until the last step so you are likely to go WTF on the CC until the end. Have faith and carry on!

The soup is "rich" so a small portion goes a long way.

Since the CC is the CC, he can't help but point out a few things.

Note the use of nuts and sweetness in what is essentially to modern palates, a savory dish. The medieval origins of this dish are really extraordinarily clear.

The CC's dinner companion noted that the dish tasted "Indian". The CC was forced to point out that much that is considered "Indian" is not Indian at all. The Persians cast a long shadow on not just Indian cuisine but India as a whole.

The Mughal emperors imported not just chefs but also mercenary soldiers from Persia. Indian classical music is a clear outgrowth of Persian models of the same (although, in all fairness, they did take it much much further!) In fact, a significant portion of modern-day Hindi vocabulary is nothing more than your routine Persian vocabulary.

This characteristic use of sweet and savory with a heavy usage of nuts is a hallmark of Persian cuisine and this dish exemplifies it completely.

On a separate note, what makes this recipe "Jewish"? It's just a recipe, right?

The answer is that the recipe can easily be made pareve if necessary. (Just use water instead of stock.) There is a rich tradition in Judaic recipes from Spain, Morocco, Iran and India that are basically vegetarian or so close that their substitution makes little difference.

The medieval Judaic cook loved flexibility at her dinner table as much as her modern-day counterpart. The easiest way to serve your guests is to develop a repertoire of recipes that can bend to the rules of  kashrut without breaking them!

There's a learning lesson if ever there was one.


(Source: Yotam Ottolenghi.)

Pistachio Soup

Ingredients

1 2/3 cups raw pistachios
1 leek coarsely chopped
4 shallots coarsely chopped
1/2" ginger coarsely chopped
1/2 tsp roasted ground cumin
4 cups chicken stock (use water if you're vegetarian - vegetable stock will NOT work!)

1 cup juice of Seville orange

OR

juice of 1 small lemon
1 cup orange juice

2 tbsp. butter
sea salt
black pepper

Recipe

NOTE: Please read the instructions carefully. There are clear steps and they matter.

Pour boiling water over the pistachios and steep for 1 minute.

Pour 4 tbsp. of the same boiling water over the saffron and let it steep.

After a minute, rub the pistachios under running water to get rid of the skin. You will not be able to get rid of all of it but do your best. This matters if you want the color of the soup to not be a dull brown. If the color doesn't matter, you can skip this step.

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Roast the pistachios for 8 minutes. Be careful. They have a tendency to burn. Reserve a few for the garnish.

Heat the butter in a pan. Add the leeks, shallots, ginger, cumin, salt and pepper and fry languidly on a medium-low heat for about 12 minutes. Add the stock and the pistachios and bring to a simmer. Add most of the saffron liquid and let cook at a low heat for about 20 minutes.

Blend the soup with a hand blender until quite smooth. (This was hard. If you blend it again the next day, you get a much more refined soup.)

Take off the heat. Add the lemon and orange juice.

Serve with a drizzle of the saffron liquid and the reserved pistachios.

The Dark Side of Pastoral

The genre of food writing both memoir and cookbook are the last gasp of the Pastoral.

The pastoral is the genre of art, literature or music which depicts rural life as lived in harmony with nature preferably according to the seasons. It's heyday was in the Romantic era late into the Industrial Revolution. The revolution had created a massive upheaval and migration from rural to urban centers. It also created massive wealth through increased productivity.

It was possible then for an urban aesthete to romanticize the myth of the unsoiled countryside clashing violently with the notably apparent grime of urbanity and thus mythologize the past.

If you find yourself thinking that this resembles a massive number of books in recent time about the "joys" of farm life, you would be entirely correct.

There is a book published recently by a woman who married a Japanese farmer, and the book is spectacular, of course, but the CC was a little puzzled that she could afford a modern house with fancy equipment in rural Japan. A teeny-tiny little dig beneath the surface, you find out that she made her money running an English school.

The book is selling a fantasy.

The blunt truth is that there is very little money to be made in farming. The reason is simple. It requires minimal skill. Any farmer in rural Africa or Asia can do the job so there's a ton of supply and only a fixed demand which goes up only slowly as populations rise.

There is an exception naturally. As any good economist would tell you that it consists of having a high demand and only limited supply. In this context, it would mean selling a unique product that nobody else produces.

This explains the rush for obscure heirloom tomatoes, varieties of eggplants, herbs, etc. The CC should also mention the existence of Sembikiya in Japan where "perfect" fruit is sold akin to jewelry (with prices to match!) These are luxury items and can easily sustain a livelihood.

Of course, you could always be a "gentleman farmer" as can be seen in the books of Jane Austen but the wealth has always been obtained from somewhere else. The farm is a consumption item not one of production, and the consumption comes attached with the genuine pleasure in consuming a superior product.

So as Ricardo might have understood it, you might as well out-source the problem, and consume the finest produce, meat and seafood that other people can procure or produce better than you unless you happen to be skilled at its production which case the CC would appreciate an invitation!

Technical Artistry

At its broadest level, the art of cooking is split into three broad categories - cooking, bread-making, and pastry.

It's routinely mentioned that the pastry-making is a science but the remaining two are arts. Ever wonder why that is the case?

Let's digress since the CC loves digressions (particularly when they shed light on the subject via metaphor.)

Many moons ago when the CC was but a wee lad, he studied chemistry. Inorganic chemistry was all moonlight and madness but organic chemistry was systematic and staid. It took twenty further years to figure out why this was the case and the answer is obvious as all answers, in hindsight, routinely are.

Organic chemistry consists of studying just three molecules (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen) which have the advantage of being "light" (meaning: the quantum mechanics is particularly simple.)

(You can add in the rest - nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, etc. but it doesn't change the basic fact.)

So it's simple because it's a highly restrictive system. The interactions are easy to understand and model.

Compare with inorganic chemistry (100+ fuckers!) with complex quantum interactions and you've gotten yourself a mess.

What does this have to do with cooking?

Everything as it turns out.

Pastry-making consists of manipulating just four variables - flour, eggs, milk^†, sugar. The products are complex but the interaction can be modeled almost perfectly. Even better, the products are regulated so you know exactly how much fat and water there is in the milk and you can weigh the flour, eggs and sugar. There is total control.

Compare it with cooking - you have almost no control. The ripeness of roughly 200+ ingredients varies, the meat and fish vary in complex ways, and the water content of vegetables changes with the seasons.

Bread-making, at least classically, is the same. You have no control over the starter (= combination of yeast + bacteria.) Plus, it changes seasonally with the temperature and humidity.

So you must improvise even though you know the rough path of the score.

Pastry-making is score-driven. Cooking needs basic routine and technique but is ultimately improvisatory.

Cooking is jazz, baby!

---

† Milk includes milk-related products like butter, cream, cheese, etc.

Early Summer Zucchini-fest

Zucchini ribbon salad with radish, cherry-tomatoes, & pine nuts on a bed of shaved beets (rosemary & sage vinaigrette) ♦ Zucchini Soup with spring onions, white beans & beet greens ♦ Zucchini Gratin with thyme & Greek basil — Sautéed fiddlehead ferns

Flavor Infusion

Have you ever had a watery soup with only one or two ingredients that was absolutely delicious? Did you ever wonder how they managed to get it infused with so much flavor? Did you suspect them of using broth?

You'd be wrong.

It is possible to bring out a vast array of flavors from just a few vegetables and water but you need to know a few tricks first.

The Italians call the technique insaporire – to infuse with flavor.

The first and the hardest part is that you cannot hurry the process. Time is the secret to success here.

The second is that you need to actually drop the vegetables in the "correct" order. The order is actually based on water content something that you will not learn from an Italian nonna's, who know these things instinctively, but since you and the CC aren't of a certain age yet, we resort to science.

The vegetables must be fried in order of least water content to most water content. Onions, leeks, garlic come first, followed by root vegetables like carrot and potato, followed by celery, followed by cooked beans, followed by mushrooms and leafy vegetables come last.

The last part is that you actually need to fry the leafy vegetables not just cook them. They have a ton of water so they need to be both blanched and wrung dry. (The broth can be preserved and added back to the soup when the time of frying is over.)

This really really matters. You cannot hurry the process nor short-circuit it.

What is really happening here?

When you fry vegetables languidly at a medium-low heat, you are basically allowing Maestro Maillard to work his magic.

When you add the water, you are just transferring the rich flavor from the surface of the vegetables to the broth. It allows you to interleave two steps into one and more importantly, do it in an economic manner – something that has always been important in the kitchen.

There are generalizations on this technique. You could use a ton of vegetables. That's what a minestrone really is. Or you could add greens. Or bung in an anchovy. Or a little diced pork. Or some raw shrimp right before serving.

However, the technique of slow frying to build the flavor remains the same.

Let's showcase this with a classic summer recipe.

Ingredients

2 leeks or spring onions (thinly sliced)
1 zucchini (sliced into half-moons)
1/2 cup white beans

2 sprigs rosemary
1 sprig sage

sea salt
black pepper

1/2 cup parmigiano-reggiano

Recipe

Cook the beans with 1 sprig of rosemary and some sea salt. Drain and set aside.

In a medium vessel, heat up some olive oil. When it shimmers, add the leeks and turn the heat to medium-low. Let it cook languidly for at least 10 minutes. Make sure they don't brown. Add the black pepper.

Add the zucchini and let it cook languidly for at least 10 minutes till the zucchini is limp but not falling apart. It may be browned in places which is fine.

Add the beans and cook for an additional 5 minutes.

Add the water and bring to a boil. Serve at once topped with the parmigiano-reggiano and additional black pepper. Crusty bread works its charm here.

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!

Vinaigrette

Most of the time, vinaigrette in restaurants sucks. The only time the CC has seen it perfectly made was, ironically, in a Japanese soba joint.

Just let that seep in for about six seconds.

This is about the most iconic of sauces. It's so easy to make that you'd have to spend energy, effort and earnestness to screw it up. Six-year olds do it with panache (and instruction.)

Let's start at the very beginning - a decidedly good place to start.

Vinaigrette is an emulsion of oil and acid to which are added salt, possibly other spices, and possibly an emulsifier.

Oil and water are immiscible. They will never mix because all oils are non-polar molecules and water is polar in nature. Hence in order to get them to mix, you need to provide energy in some form. That's what the whisking is all about. You are injecting energy into the system which translates into kinetic energy for the molecules which then thrash about like crazy and go nuts like teenagers in a mosh pit which is what an emulsion really is.

(And yes, in case you were wondering, the CC's mind does actually think like that.)

If you leave an emulsion by itself, over time, it will separate out into its components. This is because through Brownian motion the molecules are joshing about all the time and the polar molecules seek out other polar ones and the nobody cares too much about the non-polar ones which aggregate by default.

(Insert standard high-school prom joke here.)

Which brings us to:

An emulsifier is an agent that helps stabilize the emulsion. There are various mechanisms by which it works and the CC knows that if he talks about kinetic stability, what little audience there is would vanish like teenage kids when the cops show up so let's just say there are two main emulsifiers that you need to know about — mustard and egg yolks.

Vinaigrette is basically O/W or (O + S)/W if you really want to go down the rabbit hole.

(And yes, in case you are wondering, the CC went down that particular rabbit hole a long time ago.)

Now that we've gotten that out of the way.

There's a standard formula for vinaigrette. We have a few thousand years of experience on this subject collectively so it's a well-oiled (sic) and well-understood problem. Except that the restaurants missed the memo.

The broad formula is straightforward: 3 parts oil to 1 part acid by volume, salt to taste.

Do not deviate from this unless you really know what you are doing.

The variations occur along three different dimensions:

1. Different kinds of acid:
• Vinegars
• White wine vinegar
• Red wine vinegar
• Champagne vinegar
• Sherry vinegar
• Balsamic vinegar
• Fruit vinegars
• Apple
• Cherry
• (the list is endless)
• (the list is endless)
• Juices of tart fruits
• Lemon
• Lime
• Seville orange
• (the list is endless)
• Other souring agents^†.
• Raw mango juice
• Tamarind
• Bilimbi juice
• (the list is endless)
2. Different kinds of oil:
• Olive oil
• Walnut oil
• Hazelnut oil
• Almond oil
• (the list is endless)
3. Spices
• Pepper
• Mustard
• Shallots
• Herbs
• Rosemary
• Sage
• (the list is endless)
• Cheese (yep! being treated like a spice)
• (the list is endless)

There are three meta-rules that need to be respected:

1. [ Law of Awesomeness ] Both the vinegar and the oil need to be superb. (Idea is simple: the sauce is naked so you need to have fragrant stuff.)
2. [ Law of Cheapness ] If you have an overpowering ingredient (e.g. balsamic vinegar, mustard, rosemary, etc.) then use ingredients that are excellent but are inexpensive.
3. [ Law of Simplicity ] At best one or two ingredients need to shine. Everything else needs to be in the background.

That's all there is to it. Why this is so hard is beyond the CC.

(We haven't talked about the salad but the CC promises to remedy that in a few posts.)

The CC will close with a classic French vinaigrette.

Ingredients

1 shallot
2 tbsp red-wine vinegar
6 tbsp olive oil (use your absolute best!)
1/2 tsp Dijon mustard
pinch of salt
large pinch of pepper

herbs

Recipe

Dice the shallots really fine. Chop the herbs really fine if you are using.

Mix everything together and whisk like the devil. If you are making larger amounts, you can just put it in a jar and shake it like a castanet player.

Incidentally, a food processor does the job superbly. This is one of those rare cases where it may even be superior to the traditional ways.

---

† Why some enterprising chef has not taken the myriad (and endless!) souring agents of Filipino cuisine and not turned them into amazing vinaigrettes is beyond the CC. One surmises that most chefs are not intellectual in nature.

Describing Food

From Joyce's The Dead:

A fat brown goose lay at one end of the table, and at the other end, on a bed of creased paper strewn with sprigs of parsley, lay a great ham, stripped of its outer skin and peppered over with crust crumbs, a neat paper frill round its shin, and beside this was a round of spiced beef. Between these rival ends ran parallel lines of side-dishes: two little minsters of jelly, red and yellow; a shallow dish full of blocks of blancmange and red jam, a large green leaf-shaped dish with a stalk-shaped handle, on which lay bunches of purple raisins and peeled almonds, a companion dish on which lay a solid rectangle of Smyrna figs, a dish of custard topped with grated nutmeg, a small bowl full of chocolates and sweets wrapped in gold and silver papers and a glass vase in which stood some tall celery stalks. In the centre of the table there stood, as sentries to a fruit-stand which upheld a pyramid of oranges and American apples, two squat old-fashioned decanters of cut glass, one containing port and the other dark sherry. On the closed square piano a pudding in a huge yellow dish lay in waiting, and behind it were three squads of bottles of stout and ale and minerals drawn up according to the colours of their uniforms, the first two black, with brown and red labels, the third and smallest squad white, with transverse green sashes.

The Economics of Food Blogging

The blunt truth is there is not much money to be made writing food blogs. You do it as a labor of love and have a day job that pays the bills.

That's why it's so shockingly obvious when a former food blogger goes "rogue".

They start advertising specific products or specific items. Which is truly bogus.

If you want to make truly great food then you need top of the line items. That is hardly surprising. However, it is not true that you need a specific top of the line item. There is enough competition in any field that as long as you have a really good supplier, you will do extremely well.

Incidentally, there's not much money to be made doing "food trucks" either. That's why most "food truckers" sell the truck the moment they get the first book deal.

With such blunt truths, the CC doesn't envision a ton of advertisement revenue in his future. If he earns even a single penny, he will scan it and show it to the world.

Sopa de Lima

This is a superb one-pot meal. It's from the Yucatán region and resembles the classic tortilla soup except that it has different spices and the strong tang of limas - similar to but not the same as the easily available Persian limes.

The classical dish calls for both gizzards and liver so this is definitely a "simplified" version.

Ingredients

Tortilla Chips

6 corn tortillas
1 cup "neutral" oil (corn or rice)

Sopa

1 1/2 cup chopped white onion
4 cloves garlic (minced)
1 habañero chile (minced)
2 tbsp oil

1/2 tbsp ground cloves
1/4 tbsp ground cinnamon
1 tbsp dried Mexican oregano

6 cups chicken stock

1 cup canned crushed tomatoes

1 1/2 lbs chicken thighs (with the bone)

1/2 cup lime juice
2 avocados (chopped)
cilantro (chopped with stems)

Recipe

The tortillas are for making chips. You can also buy these ready-made if you have access to good ones. If not, you must dry out the tortillas overnight, cut them up and fry them in the oil till crisp. Drain on paper towels.

Heat up the 2 tbsp of oil. Fry the onions until translucent about 5 minutes. Add the garlic, habañero, cloves and cinnamon and fry for a few more minutes.

Add the peeled chopped tomatoes, the stock, oregano and chicken. Bring to a simmer and reduce the heat to a low simmer. Cover and cook for about 75 minutes till the chicken is cooked through.

(Just to point out that most recipe writers are bollocky bitches and bastards, most suggest a 20-minute simmer. It took more than 60 minutes to get the thighs to be tender, and there was nothing remotely special about the CC's chicken.)

Pull out the chicken using a pair of tongs. Shred it with a fork and toss the bones away. Add it back to the pot. Add salt to taste and some of the lime shells. Cook for 10 more minutes. Fish the lime shells out.

Add the lime juice just before serving.

Serve garnished with the fried tortilla chips, chopped avocados and cilantro.

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.

A Simple Bengali Meal

Naked Lunch

There are many many Italian recipes that rely not only on precise timing but the absolutely best of ingredients.

That's because they are naked.

They barely consist of an ingredient or two and would easily be spoilt if the timings are off. Also, unlike a lot of recipes they are not "salvageable". A mistake is the same as guaranteed failure. In fact, they are frequently given as a test to budding chefs to see how well they cope with pressure in the kitchen.

However they are far from difficult.

They are shockingly easy if you understand the logic and get a good grasp of the timing and they are best enjoyed with a glass of excellent wine at a solitary lunch away from all pressures (like serving food to other people.)

Easy except for the pressure of timing, of course!

The recipes come from all over Italy. Butter dominates in the North. Olive oil in the South. There are passionate arguments on both sides and much heat is generated but not enough light so the CC will skip these meaningless arguments in favor of the recipes themselves.

What is common to all of them is the logic of pasta making and the excellence of the ingredients — kinda obvious given that there are so few to start with.

Boil the heavily-salted water. When it comes to a boil, add the pasta (almost but not always dried for dishes of this nature.) Get the timing right. Start making the sauce at precisely the right time so that the pasta will be ready in time for the sauce. Add a ladleful of the pasta water to the sauce (which is how the salt gets into the sauce.) Toss everything together and serve at once.

It's like a dance relying on perfect timing.

Spaghetti Alio e Olio (Roman)

Ingredients

6-8 cloves garlic (minced)

chopped red chilli pepper (optional)

6 tbsp olive oil
black pepper
chopped parsley

Recipe

Sautée the garlic in olive oil at low heat till golden. Be very very careful as it has a tendency to burn. (= FAIL!)

Add a splash of the pasta water, a generous amount of black pepper, and the spaghetti. Toss everything together.

Spaghetti Cacio e Pepe

Ingredients

2 tbsp "fat" (butter or olive oil)
1 clove garlic (smashed)

1/2 cup grated parmigiano-reggiano
4 tbsp black pepper
1 tbsp chopped rosemary

Recipe

NOTE: the amount black pepper is not a mistake. The name means "cheese and black pepper" and if you desire black pepper then black pepper it shall be!

Heat up the butter or olive oil. Add the garlic and let cook gently until golden but not burnt. (= FAIL!)

When the pasta is done, add everything else with some pasta water and toss together.

Pasta con Burro e Salvia

Ingredients

4 tbsp butter
10-12 sage leaves

1/2 cup grated parmigiano-reggiano

Recipe

NOTE: This recipe is best with fresh pasta because the butter brings out the rich taste of the eggs in the pasta.

Heat up the butter and let it cook at low heat until it is golden but the milk fat solids have not burnt (= FAIL!)

Toss in the sage leaves and fry for a few seconds. More and they will burn. (= FAIL!)

Toss in the pasta, the cheese and some pasta water if needed and serve at once.