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The Why of Cooking (2017)

theatlantic.com

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Re: The Why of Cooking (2017)

#11

Post by twic »

Tomte wrote: post #7
dgacmu wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't read "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat" as recommended in the article, but I swear by: Julia Child, "the way to cook" Jeff Potter, "Cooking for geeks" Kenji lopez-alt's "the food lab" The author does compare to most of these, so the recommendation seems solid.

I was underwhelmed by "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat". Good information, great presentation, but not up there with the very best books, IMO. I like Ruhlman's "Twenty", maybe followed by "Ratio". "How to Cook without a Book" by Anderson is great, although you probably needwhole rooms in your house for food storage if you took her "what you should have in your pantry" serious. My most used cookbook is the one my mother gave me…

What's the name of that last cookbook?

Re: The Why of Cooking (2017)

#12

Post by Tomte »

twic wrote: post #11
Tomte wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was underwhelmed by "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat". Good information, great presentation, but not up there with the very best books, IMO. I like Ruhlman's "Twenty", maybe followed by "Ratio". "How to Cook without a Book" by Anderson is great, although you probably needwhole rooms in your house for food storage if you took her "what you should have in your pantry" serious. My most used cookbook is the one my mother gave me…

What's the name of that last cookbook?

It's a German one, "Nahrungszubereitung Schritt für Schritt".

Re: The Why of Cooking (2017)

#13

Post by molf »

latch wrote: post #10
PMan74 wrote: post #3

> But recipes, for all their precision and completeness, are poor teachers. They tell you what to do, but they rarely tell you why to do it. This drives me crazy about recipes e.g. adding vinegar to poaching water is recommended in lots of perfect poached eggs guides but few explain why (makes the whites firm even faster to prevent them from dispersing in the water). It's really 'teach a man to fish' kind of stuff, k…

From my experience, the amount of vinegar required to see an actual difference is enough to change the flavor of the eggs. Try creating a vortex in your water and placing the egg inside [1] (although they still use a "drop of vinegar') [1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2010/se...

An even better technique (I tried lots) is to put the eggs in boiling water for 20-30s before breaking and poaching them. It will start the coagulation process of the egg whites, making it much more viscous when you actually do break them. This causes the egg whites to keep together and not spread in the water too quickly. Result is a nicer, rounder poached egg.

Re: The Why of Cooking (2017)

#14

Post by Cenk »

Tomte wrote: post #7
dgacmu wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't read "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat" as recommended in the article, but I swear by: Julia Child, "the way to cook" Jeff Potter, "Cooking for geeks" Kenji lopez-alt's "the food lab" The author does compare to most of these, so the recommendation seems solid.

I was underwhelmed by "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat". Good information, great presentation, but not up there with the very best books, IMO. I like Ruhlman's "Twenty", maybe followed by "Ratio". "How to Cook without a Book" by Anderson is great, although you probably needwhole rooms in your house for food storage if you took her "what you should have in your pantry" serious. My most used cookbook is the one my mother gave me…

I also recommend Samin Nosrat’s Longform interview:

https://longform.org/posts/longform-podcast-243-samin-nosrat

Re: The Why of Cooking (2017)

#15

Post by mikekchar »

jiehong wrote: post #6

The fact is that not all "why"s are known in cooking yet, and the combination of ingredients is so varied that it's not always easy to go from a myth to a reasonable explanation. Although, lots of research has greatly improved, and I warmly recommend you to read “Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking” (2011). Then, for techniques, I strongly recommend following a book designed for chefs when they learn. F…

One of my favourite aha moments: Back when I was much younger virtually every cookbook said you should add olive oil to pasta cooking water. I could never figure out why. Later people pretty much poo-pooed the practice saying that it was some old wives tale about stopping the pot from boiling over or some such thing.

Fast forward many years and I was trying to work on a bolognese sauce. My wife likes meat/tomato sauces on spaghetti. I think it's weird because long pasta like that should be with an oil/cream based sauce. Anyway, I figured it would make the dish much better if I somehow coated the spaghetti with olive oil and then spooned the meat sauce on top. But how to easily coat the spaghetti with olive oil? I figured it would be easiest to float a tablespoon of olive oil on the pasta water and then draw the spaghetti through it as I took it out of the water. And then I realised what I was doing :-) Still not sure if that's why people suggested it oh so many years ago, but it works a treat!

Re: The Why of Cooking (2017)

#16

Post by mikekchar »

dgacmu wrote: post #4
PunchTornado wrote: post #2

I so want to learn to cook good food, but it is so hard to start alone. Meanwhile an evening of sushi workshop in london costs 80£ and it is fully booked till August.

I haven't read "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat" as recommended in the article, but I swear by: Julia Child, "the way to cook" Jeff Potter, "Cooking for geeks" Kenji lopez-alt's "the food lab" The author does compare to most of these, so the recommendation seems solid.

I learned to cook from "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" by Julia Child et al. I still think it's the best instructive cook book I've ever seen (with the exception of some bread books, of which there are numerous incredible examples).

Re: The Why of Cooking (2017)

#17

Post by dsr_ »

"I tried to read it [On Food and Cooking] straight through, and stopped dejectedly in the middle of a history of dairy—I think around where McGee describes the first time humans turned water-buffalo milk into mozzarella."

It's holding my teenage son's interest. McGee wrote a good textbook, not a novel. You have to want to understand the topic and be willing to put in some work, to stick with it.

Re: The Why of Cooking (2017)

#18

Post by stevedh »

molf wrote: post #13
latch wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience, the amount of vinegar required to see an actual difference is enough to change the flavor of the eggs. Try creating a vortex in your water and placing the egg inside [1] (although they still use a "drop of vinegar') [1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2010/se...

An even better technique (I tried lots) is to put the eggs in boiling water for 20-30s before breaking and poaching them. It will start the coagulation process of the egg whites, making it much more viscous when you actually do break them. This causes the egg whites to keep together and not spread in the water too quickly. Result is a nicer, rounder poached egg.

That's an interesting idea. Do you leave the eggs to cool prior to breaking or are the cool enough to be handled after 20s?

Re: The Why of Cooking (2017)

#19

Post by croon »

> Any one of these recipes offers a fix under specific conditions, but after cooking through enough of them, those isolated recommendations can congeal into a realization

> The downside of learning to cook primarily through recipes, then, is that these small eurekas—which, once hit upon, are instantly applicable to nearly any other dish one prepares—are most often arrived at via triangulation. It’s like trying to learn a language only by copying down others’ sentences, instead of learning the grammar and vocabulary needed to put to paper lines of one’s own.

Is that necessarily bad?

I can totally buy individual differences in how people take to new information, but I've always had best results with applied learning, and later reading or realizing the rules. It's how we all learned to speak, and it's how I later learned this language.

I'm sure that it's most efficient for a machine to learn the game of football by just parsing all the rules, but for a human I imagine it's much harder to retain those rules without having played some touch football in the park or watched games as a kid to build a model on which to apply those rules.

Re: The Why of Cooking (2017)

#20

Post by molf »

stevedh wrote: post #18
molf wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An even better technique (I tried lots) is to put the eggs in boiling water for 20-30s before breaking and poaching them. It will start the coagulation process of the egg whites, making it much more viscous when you actually do break them. This causes the egg whites to keep together and not spread in the water too quickly. Result is a nicer, rounder poached egg.

That's an interesting idea. Do you leave the eggs to cool prior to breaking or are the cool enough to be handled after 20s?

The shell quickly cools down and you should be able to handle it pretty soon after taking them out.
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