On Food and Cooking
This is surprising for a couple reasons. It's easy to imagine the invention of cheese or yogurt if you assume people were already consuming milk. Wine and malting were invented under similar circumstances - fermentation of something already consumed. If humans weren't drinking milk, why'd they have it sitting around in containers? Second, modern lactose-intolerant humans can drink on average about a cup of milk without major issues - so even before widespread lactose tolerance, some amount of milk would still be useful. Further, wouldn't children have been tolerant of lactose even before…
Kenji is awesome, and probably the best reason to read seriouseats. But for anyone who enjoys food science, you really have to start with Harold McGee's classic "On Food and Cooking": http://smile.amazon.com/Food-Cooking-Science-Lore-Kitchen/dp... (Sorry for the enormous URL.) Also, I binge-listen to Dave Arnold's podcast, "Cooking Issues" on Heritage Radio network. A treasure trove of food science facts, going well beyond eggs: sous vide meat, hydrocolloids, liquid nitrogen cocktails, etc. http://heritageradionetwork.org/series/cooking-issues/ (You really have to give the show a chance,…
Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking" is a great book to read (it kicked off the popularization of food science), and Alton Brown's "Good Eats" was a fantastic cooking show full of great kitchen geekery. I've also heard that "The Four-Hour Chef" (yes, God help us, same guy) is actually a good starter book. Also, "Cookwise" and "Bakewise." Great books. More personally, let me say that the best way to learn how to cook is to go to the market, find some stuff that looks interesting, and then figure out what to do with them. Pretty soon you'll have an intuitive idea of techniques to use with…
This is pretty specific to slow cooking meat. There's lots of good ways to slow cook meat. I think slow cookers(aka Crockpots) have a lot of downsides. If I've got 8 hours to cook a piece of meat, I've probably got the time to sous vide, which I think gives better texture. If I had a smoker, I'd go that way for the flavor and texture. I'd rather braise in the oven as well. Crockpots are easy, and leave the oven free, but I think too often give a universal mushiness to many cuts. They can be used well for long meat cooks, but it's more difficult than it seems. For a bigger upfront purchase…
Can't seem to read the article. Some JS crap is freezing the page and can't scroll down (Firefox). I've learnt lots from both books and videos. Being a "good cook" requires a few things: * Skill in common techniques, * Knowledge of ingredients, * Good tools, * Repertoire. Videos are great for learning techniques. I've got books that do an admirable job of teaching how to knead or whisk etc., but nothing beats seeing someone do it. Some techniques are impossible to replicate without the right tools, though. You won't be able to replicate the chopping techniques you see with a cheap,…
The master of scientific cooking is Harold McGee (On Food and Cooking) https://www.amazon.com/Food-Cooking-Science-Lore-Kitchen/dp/... and always has been. Nearly every serious chef has this on their shelf. To boot, he's a super-nice guy and I talked to him a couple times when he came to Google. Secondly, there's a fundamental difference in goals between home cooking and professional cooking. If you're doing it over and over in a restaurant, you really want it to be the same every time. If you're doing it for yourself, you need to accept and revel in the differences. If it really sucks,…
They aren't called patterns, they are called techniques. There's tons of books about all the techniques you can use. When you understand some of the basic techniques, it's apparent what techniques are being used when you read a cook book. The problem is, even if you only got as technical as saying "make a velouté sauce" in half the cookbooks you see, then people would freak out if you didn't tell them how. When you learn the fundamental techniques, you can easily extrapolate them and realize half the recipes you read in your cookbooks are (necessarily) overcomplicated and can be reduced (no…
To answer the question a bit -- I love to cook, and have for awhile, though it isn't always easy finding the time for it. Watching the common cooking shows are good, but stay away from shows like Top Chef (at least while you're learning) as they are well advanced, and you're not going to learn much. On the flip side, Jamie Oliver used to have a brilliant show wherein he focused on simple recipes that were easy to put together and tasted amazingly. One of the shows I've been watching recently is "Worst Cooks in America" which, while the show itself sucks, actually goes through and shows…
According to Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking, rice turns bad pretty fast at room temperature. Here's from "Keeping Rice Safe" (p. 475): "Cooked rice turns out to be a potential source of food poisoning. Raw rice almost always carries dormant spores of the bacterium Bacillus cereus, which produces powerful gastrointestinal toxins. The spores can tolerate high temperatures, and some survive cooking. If cooked rice is left for a few hours at room temperature, the spores germinate, bacteria multiply and toxins accumulate. Ordinary cooked rice should therefore be served promptly, and leftovers…
I took a trip to my local university library once and found the food science section. It made On Food and Cooking look like Green Eggs and Ham in comparison and I learned more than I cared to about pineapple canning. (To be fair, McGee’s work does exactly what I did but with multiple orders of magnitude more effort: summarizing food science journal papers into single paragraphs.) One thing that’s always struck me as fun about cooking as a science is that your reagents need to be live calibrated by look and feel. Want to use the right amount of cyder vinegar but it’s from a brand /…