I am constantly surprised by the number of cooking rules, accepted cooking concepts that
can and should be broken.
And even in the time that I've been making shows about food I've had to face my own lack
of imagination.
I used to be a proponent of the old fill a big pot of water and bring it to a boil to
cook your dried pasta and I accepted it because I had been trained by people that beat it
into me.
And then later if you question these things you realize gee, I can actually cook dried
pasta better in a very small amount of cold water that's brought to the boil.
For very often searing a steak is best done after you've done most of the cooking, which
is not what has been taught.
So I think that when it comes to food innovation and kind of day-to-day tips to get better
food on the table requires constant questioning.
The word why, which most of us didn't ask in food 20 years ago, is now the most important
word that we can use.
Why?
Why do we do this?
Why have we always seared steak before we finished cooking the steak?
Why don't we roast it and then sear it?
These are all questions that we have to kind of constantly ask.
But the pasta water one is probably the most simple one I can think of.
We have all been taught to boil or pasta in massive amounts of water and it absolutely
makes no sense whatsoever when you think about it and when you start asking the question
why.
A lot of figuring out how to handle your food is based on trying to have a clear understanding
of the actual food, what is in that food and the heat that you're applying and what you
want to get done.
Let's say that you want a nice big juicy steak that's medium rare but has a really great
sear on the outside.
Now a lot of people would say well fine we're going to take that out of the refrigerator
and we're going to get a pan really hot or a grill really hot and we're going to slap
it on there and we're going to turn it over and we're going to stick it with a fork a
few times and then we're going to call it done.
But when you start really thinking about what a steak is made up of, the system of muscles,
myofibrils and the things that actually work inside a muscle and the chemicals that are
involved you start to realize wow what I really need to do is think of it as three different
thermal trips.
I get it out of the refrigerator and let it come to room temperature because that is going
to allow for a faster cooking.
I want a really good sear but I want most of the interior of the meat to be medium rare.
Okay, well in that case what I really need to do is to make my primary cooking method
about what I want most of the meat to be.
So, what makes sense, I treat it like a roast.
I put it in the oven at a lower temperature; let the inside of the meat get closer to that
medium rare temperature; take it out; rest it for a little while; salt it and then sear
the outside.
So you actually start thinking about it as two different pieces of meat.
I'm cooking the interior of the meat and I'm cooking the exterior of the meat and they're
actually two different processes.
That sounds complicated but actually it's not.
It does however require that you understand something about what meat actually is and
how it actually works.
Cooking pasta, we've always brought huge amounts of water to a boil and dumped it in.
Why have we done that?
Well, a lot of people kind of argue about how we got into the habit of doing that and
it would take a really long time to discuss that.
But in examining it as a practice say why does this make sense?
What are we trying to do?
We're trying to rehydrate something without overcooking it.
We're trying to make it al dente, that is we want it to be a certain texture in the
tooth; we don't want it to be mushy; we don't want it to be too done.
Well, by cooking it in boiling water we still have to think about the fact that we're saturating
a very dense dried piece of starch and protein, most dry pasta being made with relatively
high protein wheat varieties.
So what do we really need to do?
Well, we need to bring it to a boil.
That's true.
Because we've got some certain expectations for the outside of that noodle from a texture
standpoint.
But the wise thing is to actually start it, at least in my opinion is to start it in colder
water so that we're slowly bringing it up to temperature, which gives more time for
the starches to rehydrate without actually over cooking.
And it's just a matter of kind of thinking about what does this food actually need from
a realistic standpoint?
What is it and how is heat and water going to affect it?
And when you kind of break it down that way it leads you to some hypotheses, which hopefully
lead you to some experiments, which hopefully lead you to better food.
Let's talk about pie dough.
Pie dough is the reason that most people don't make pie because it's almost impossible to
teach how to do it through a written recipe.
You really do need to be able to do it next to someone.
And that's why we used to be better bakers so we used to learn from our grandmothers,
our parents being right is there doing it.
We don't anymore we learn off of the Interwebs and off of books.
But here's the thing, you've got to make something wet in order to bring it together to a dough.
But the problem is is that water and the proteins in wheat flour very often form this very,
very elastic matrix that we call gluten.
Now there are a lot of ways to say well we're just going to use a gluten-free flour and
we start laying in all these other factors and that's fine, but you can also just change
the nature of the liquid.
Nobody said that you should only use water.
And in fact when I make pie dough I use vodka instead of water because it's a liquid but
it's got a lot less actually water in it and that water tends to stay bound to the ethanol
that is in the alcohol, rather than binding up as much with the wheat proteins.
And we're not talking about enough, it's not like it's a martini or anything, but it will
actually give you a better quality pie dough that won't be gummy, won't be as hard to work
with and it will take a lot less liquid.
So there's just another thing of thinking of I need to know what my ingredients are
and how they act.
Okay, water and flour do this I don't want that; what else can I use?
Vodka.
You've got some in the freezer probably.