31–40 of 104 posts
Very important book when you're interested in the details: McGee, On Food and Cooking.
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 sauc…
The main drawback to putting oil in the pasta water or tossing the pasta with oil/butter afterwards is that some pasta sauces won't stick too well to oiled pasta. This may not be such an issue with fattier sauces: cream sauces or something with ground meat, since they already have oils in the sauce. Vegetarian tomato sauces (regardless of fake meat) seem to fare worse.
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.
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 sauc…
Pasta cooking in boiling water has a tendency to over boil as the flour is very good at making stable foam that will rise in your pot.
The oil acts as a anti-foaming agent[1] here[2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defoamer [2]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/jctb.2804301...
> 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…
That's why I loved cookings shows like Good Eats by Alton Brown or ones with Heston Blumenthal. They approach cooking from a more scientific approach in that they explain the why (and with Good Eats often a funny demonstration). And with the knowing why things are done, you can use that to experiment a bit more yourself.
:-)
[Cooking for enginneers](http://www.cookingforengineers.com/) offers a nice system to learn how to cook
I mean, sure, this is mainly motivated by the fact that I hate cooking. But it also just makes logical sense to me as a way to organise the universal human need for food, like we’ve done for other universal human needs.
“While cooking is for many a hobby, it is also a thing that nearly everyone has to do, usually when time is short.“ If only this wasn’t the case. This is always unpopular whenever I say it, but we no longer expect everyone to sew their own clothes or bake their own bread - why do we still demand that everyone cook for themselves (and, often, that they enjoy it too)? As this article demonstrates, the barrier for even…
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 sauc…
In Italy no professional chef I know would allow oil in the boiling pan ("that's what Frenchies do, because they don't know how to cook pasta without making it stick" being the common answer)
It's a shame this ancient ritual is not fully appreciated for what it truly does for society.