Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food

by Jeff Potter

  If you tweet, follow @cookingforgeeks; use the hashtag "#c4g" for general discussion.

  Many of the photos included in this book are available under a Creative Commons license on Flickr; see the photosteam at http://www.flickr.com/cookingforgeeks. If you post photos of dishes you’ve made from recipes in this book, tag them with "cookingforgeeks" so that they show up on the Community section on http://www.cookingforgeeks.com.

  Acknowledgments

  I extend my thanks to my good friends Mark Lewis and Aaron Double. Mark suffered through the first versions of both the food and the chapters and provided invaluable feedback on both. Aaron spent too much time turning my chicken-scratch sketches into the charts and diagrams that appear throughout the book. (Aaron is an amazing industrial designer—see http://www.docodesign.com—and he can use Illustrator faster than I can use paper and pencil.) Barbara Vail and Matt Kiggins helped dig up research papers on everything from the aforementioned myosin proteins to average weight gains during the holidays (about 0.5 lbs—not much, but it turns out we don’t tend to lose it the following spring), while Quinn Norton fed me congee and helped in more ways than one with the interviews and text.

  I’m extremely grateful to the many chefs, bloggers, researchers, and scientists who took time out of their often insanely busy schedules to speak with me. Their insights helped shape the way I think, and I hope the resulting interviews in the book are not just informative, but fun.

  Thanks to all those who joined me for the weekly Book Club and Test Club dinners while working on the book, and, finally, thanks to Marlowe, Laurel, Brian, Edie, and the team at O’Reilly and the tech reviewers whose feedback has made this a better book. And of course, thanks to my parents for being so supportive and encouraging. I’ll try to not splatter duck fat on the ceiling next time I’m home.

  I hope you have as much fun trying out the various ideas in this book as I did putting them together!

  My first cookbook, circa 1984.

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  Chapter 1. Hello, Kitchen!

  WE GEEKS ARE FASCINATED BY HOW THINGS WORK, AND MOST OF US EAT, TOO.

  The modern geek is more than just a refined version of the stereotypical movie geek from the ’80s. True, there’s a contemporary equivalent, who have swapped Star Wars posters, pocket protectors, and large glasses held together by tape for really, really smart phones, hipster glasses, and social websites running on virtual machines. The Internet has given the computer geek a new challenge. For most of us techies, the largest obstacle in building something great has changed from a technical to a social one. The question is no longer can you build it, but will people want it? We’re becoming a different kind of community, one that has to relate to a half a billion Facebook users, Twitterers, and lolcats. (I can has cheezburger? See Simple Cheeseburger.)

  But what it means to be a geek today can also be broader. Overly intellectual. Obsessed with details. Going beyond the point where a mainstream user would stop, often to the bemusement of those who don’t "get it." Physics geeks. Coffee geeks. Almost-anything geeks. A geek is anyone who dwells with some amount of obsession on why something works and how to make that something better. And it’s become a badge of honor to be a geek.

  At our core, though, all of us geeks still share that same inner curiosity about the hows and whys with the pocket-protector crowd of yesteryear. This is where so many cookbooks fail us. Traditional cookbooks are all about the what, giving steps and quantities but offering little in the way of engineering-style guidance or ways of helping us think.

  Unfortunately, there’s no way (yet) to download a program for kitchen techniques and experience straight into your brain. Don’t expect to walk away after finishing this book (or any other) knowing how to make a perfect four-course meal. That’d be like saying, "Hey, I want to learn how to program, so maybe I should start by writing my own operating system!"

  But don’t despair. Learning to cook is not so much about rote memorization or experience as it is about curiosity, and that’s something us geeks have way more of than your average "random." With the right mindset and a few "Hello, World!" examples, you can crack the culinary code and be well on your way to having a good time in the kitchen.

  In this first chapter, we’ll cover how to approach the kitchen. What does it mean for a geek to hack in the kitchen? What things should a beginner keep in mind? What does success in the kitchen mean? How do you pick a recipe, and then how do you interpret it correctly?

  We’ll also briefly touch on nutrition. If you’re already comfortable in the kitchen, you might want to skim this and the next chapter and dig right in with Chapter 3.

  Note

  Always read through the entire recipe, top to bottom, before starting.

  Think Like a Hacker

  hack: 1. n. Originally, a quick job that produces what is needed, but not well. 2. n. An incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed.

  --Eric S. Raymond’s Jargon File

  hacker: a person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular. The term is often misused in a pejorative context, where "cracker" would be the correct term.

  --RFC1392, Internet Engineering Task Force

  My microwave has no 3 key, but I can enter 2:60.

  --As tweeted by Tom Igoe, @tigoe

  Cooking has the same types of hard constraints that code, hardware, and most science disciplines do. Processes (chemical or virtual), reactions, allocation of resources (more veggies!), and timing all matter. And while each discipline has standard techniques for solving these constraints, invariably there are other clever alternatives. Hacks don’t have to be quick and dirty (that’d be a hack job), or overly involved works of perfection.

  Some of the best hacks start out as safe and stable ways of solving unexpected problems, and being able to see those solutions is what it means to think like a hacker. It’s rare to see a hack called for in a spec. Imagine a programmer coding a script that needs to count the number of lines in a text file. Standard method? Open, read a line, ++, close. Five minutes until demo? `wc –l "$file"`. While the hack is easier and faster to write, you should probably understand open/read/close first and know how and when to use them
.

  If you’re new to the kitchen, buckle down and be prepared to learn the system from the inside out before breaking out the blowtorch, methylcellulose, or centrifuge. Every one of the well-respected chefs and instructors interviewed for this book has a thorough grasp of the fundamentals of cooking. Those who use tools like centrifuges and ingredients like methylcellulose use them as ways of extending those cooking fundamentals, not merely for the sake of novelty. To the pros, these newer techniques and ingredients simply expand their repertoires, taking their place alongside olive oil, flour, and other pantry staples.

  Spraying a muffin tin on a dishwasher door.

  Mug as plastic bag holder.

  Strainer as splatter guard.

  Roasting peppers in a toaster.

  Metal bowl as double boiler.

  What does it mean to take the hacking mindset into the kitchen? Sometimes it’s technique. Rolling pizza or pie dough to a uniform thickness by eye can be tricky, but slap a few rubber bands on each end of the rolling pin, and you’ve got an instant guide. Need to pour spices or coffee grinds into a plastic bag? Drop the plastic bag in a mug or cup and fold the edge of the bag over the edge. "Hacking" can apply to the ingredients as well, as you’ll see in Chapter 3.

  Ways of doing things become obvious once you see them. The challenge in the kitchen is to see where you want to go and then find a path that gets you there. Thinking like a hacker means thinking of an end state and then figuring out how to get there in a time- and space-optimal (and fewest-dishes-possible) way.

  How does one go about discovering hacks and tricks in the kitchen? Here’s a thought experiment: imagine you’re given a candle, a book of matches, and a box of nails, and asked to mount the candle on a wall. Without burning down the house, how would you do it?

  Functional Fixedness

  The problem just described is called Duncker’s Candle Problem, after Karl Duncker, who studied the cognitive biases that we bring to problems. In this example, things like the paper of the matchbook have a "fixed function" of protecting the matches. We don’t normally think of the matchbook cover as a piece of thick cardboard that’s been folded over; we just see that as part of the matchbook. Recognizing the object as capable of serving other functions requires mental restructuring, something that the scriptwriters for MacGyver excelled at.

  This mental restructuring is something that most geeks are naturally good at. All those interview puzzles common in the tech industry? You know: how would you start a fire with a can of soda and bar of chocolate?[1] Or, you’re given 12 gold coins and a balance scale, but wait! One of the coins is fake, either lighter or heaver than the others, and the balance scale will magically break after exactly three uses. Problems like these almost invariably come down to breaking functional fixedness and overcoming confirmation bias (here, in the sense of being blinded to new uses by knowing previous uses). The obvious solutions to the candle problem—pushing the nails through the candle or melting the candle so that it sticks to them—will either split the candle or leave it too close to a wall to be safe. The solution, or at least the one Duncker was looking for, involves repurposing the box that had been holding the nails into a shelf. (I’m dreading all the emails I’m going to get with photos of this being done in other ways.)

  Approaches for overcoming functional fixedness in puzzles, code, or the kitchen are the same. Understand what you actually have and what you’re asked to do, break it down into individual steps, and explore different possibilities for each discrete step. Take the quest for the perfect cup of coffee: can you isolate the variables for bean grind, temperature, pressure, etc. and then explore the combinations in a controlled way, varying just one variable at a time? Think about the ingredients you’re starting with and the end state you want, as opposed to the straight execution of a recipe. This way, when the execution inevitably veers off course, you can understand the step you are at and how to catch and correct the exception. Of course, be open to other possible outcomes—the way a meal turns out will sometimes be different than what you originally conceived.

  Thinking about the end state will also help broaden how you think about cooking more generally. Cooking is not just about food in a pan; it’s about health and well-being, community and giving. Why do you want to cook? Watching your waist or your wallet? Health and finances are common considerations. Building community? Potlucks, shared meals, and barbeques can be fun social activities and even spur friendly competition. Expressing love? Cooking can be an act of giving, both in the literal sense of sustenance and in the spiritual sense of sharing time and breaking bread together.

  Cooking also allows you to try new things—there are plenty of foods that you can’t order in a restaurant. Perhaps you want to get closer to your source of food, in which case learning how simple it can be to put together many common dishes will bring you at least one step closer. And then there’s getting yet another step closer: I happen to eat meat, but what I buy at the store is so far removed from a living, breathing animal that I find it hard to identify with the life of the critter. (The English language doesn’t help. We eat beef, but it’s a cow. We eat pork, but it’s a pig. Chickens don’t seem to be smart enough to merit a clear separation.) To properly respect an animal’s life, to understand where my food comes from and to be mindful of not wasting it, I feel that at some point I should have to butcher an animal myself. (You could try lobster, but I’ve yet to get teary-eyed over one.) For me, cooking is also as much about escaping from work as it is about satisfying hunger, not to mention having fun trying new things with friends and knowing that what I’m putting in my body is healthy.

  Regardless of your reason for wanting to cook, realize that there’s more to cooking than just following a recipe. When looking at the end goal, think beyond the cooking stage. If your reason for cooking is to express affection, you should consider the sensations that your food brings your guests and the perceptions and reactions they have to it as much as the cooking itself. On the other side, if you’re cooking primarily for health or financial reasons, the quality and price of ingredients will be much more important.

  If your goals are social, the end state isn’t the food on the plate; it’s the perceptions that are brought about by the experience of eating. If you’re making a meal for a romantic interest, give thought not just to the work done in cooking, but also the experience at the table. While you can’t control your guest’s perceptions, you do have control over the inputs, cooking, and sensations, all of which inform and shape those perceptions. Even something as simple as preheating your plates so that hot food remains hot can make an impact. (Cold sautéed fish and vegetables? Yuck.) For some, the extra effort of setting the table with nice flatware or festive plates can be a powerful signal of attention and affection.

  The solution to Duncker’s Candle Problem, at least according to Duncker, is to use the box holding the nails as a makeshift shelf to hold the candle.

  Stages and reasons for cooking.

  We’ll cover the first column of the stages and reasons for cooking diagram, Inputs, in Chapter 3 and give Cooking its due respect in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5. Some elements from the final two columns, Sensations and Perceptions, are covered indirectly in Chapter 6 and Chapter 7, since playing with textures and presentations is a great way to evoke memories. But the essence of sensations and perceptions is much more in the personal domain. If your reasons for cooking include being social, giving, and romantic, consider how to draw upon these aspects as you try things from this book.

  Finally, for those who say presentation doesn’t matter, think about dining-hall food, and then check out Fancy Fast Food (http://www.fancyfastfood.com). How we approach food, from a food psychology and consumer behavior perspective, impacts our experience much more than we are typically willing to admit, even when confronted with hard data. See the interview with Brian Wansink on the next page for a story about his graduate students and Chex Mix to get a sense of just how far this denial goes!

 
; Brian Wansink on Cooking Styles

  PHOTO USED BY PERMISSION OF BRIAN WANSINK

  Brian Wansink is a professor at Cornell University, where he studies the way we interact with food. His book, Mindless Eating (Bantam), examines how we make our choices about how much and what kinds of foods we eat.

  Tell me a bit about the styles of cooking that you have found.

  We find that the nutritional gatekeeper, what we call the person who purchases and prepares the food in their home, controls about 72% of all the food their family eats. They do it either positively or negatively: positively if they serve fruit bowls, negatively if they serve candy dishes.

  We did a study of 1,004 North Americans. These were good cooks, people considered by themselves and by at least one of their family members to be a far above average cook. We asked probably about 120 questions of all different aspects. We found that about 80% to 85% could be categorized in one of five different ways.

  The giving cooks are the people who see the food they make as giving love. They tend to be great bakers, very traditional in the recipes they make. There’s not a lot of changing or tweaking of the recipes. They’re the ones who all the families go to on Thanksgiving or Christmas.

  The second one of these good cooks is the healthy cook. This shouldn’t be that surprising, but these are the people who will sacrifice taste to make something healthy. They eat lots of fish and tend to be most likely an exerciser of all these groups. They’re more likely than the others to have a garden as well.