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

by Jeff Potter

  The third group is the methodical cook. The methodical cook can pretty much make anything, but she or he has to have that cookbook right in front of them the entire time. After they finish making something, it’s going to look exactly like it looks in the cookbook. Their kitchen is going to look pretty much like Iwo Jima. They have some of the skills, but they don’t have the familiarity, the "second nature" of cooking that would make them facile in the kitchen.

  The fourth group is an innovative cook. They cook by second nature. They seldom use cookbooks and if they do they just look at the picture and say, "Yeah, I can do that!" These people are pretty creative in a lot of other areas of their life, too. Cooking for them is almost like painting might be for an artist or messing around with music might be for a musician. It’s not just a hobby; it’s sort of an expressive release. Innovative cooks are interesting, because very little of their ego is involved in the food they make. If something goes wrong, they’re not going to be shattered and cry in the corner for the rest of the day. They’re just going to be like, "Eh, tried it and it didn’t work, no big deal."

  The fifth group of good cooks are also very fun. These are competitive cooks. They cook to impress other people. You can kind of consider them to be the Iron Chefs of the neighborhood. They’ll try new things. They’ll try weird things, but not because they like new weird things; they want you to leave that night going, "That guy is incredible! Man, that was great!"

  If you have two people who are in a relationship, I have to imagine there are combinations of style that lead to some amount of conflict, like a giving cook baking for someone trying to get fit. Do you have any advice for couples or families where the nutritional gatekeeper is doing something that’s antagonistic without knowing it?

  In most people’s lives, about five meals per week can cause conflict. First, breakfasts are eaten at staggered times and since they’re kind of low-prep things, the person can do whatever they want to or skip it. Lunches are often eaten offsite and you can pack your own. The action is usually at dinner, but even with dinners, there could be a night or two where people might eat somewhere else, or a night or two when one of them is away. It leaves a very small handful of meals where there is potential conflict. That can be further reduced by having one night when the nondominant cook ends up doing the cooking for everyone else. So, for instance, on Mondays I usually cook for my family to give my wife a break.

  What are the easiest habits that a geek can change to help them eat healthier?

  This depends on what their issues are. One would be simply to use a smaller plate. A smaller plate leads you to eat 22% less than a larger plate. That only works with fresh food, because if all you’re doing is heating up frozen food, you’re going to eat all you can heat. Another one would be to serve off the counter. What we find is a person ends up being about two-sevenths as likely to go back for seconds or thirds or fourths if a dish is simply six or more feet away.

  How much of those biases and those cues can we counteract by knowing about them? Do they tend to go away once we’re aware of them?

  I took 60 graduate students and for 90 minutes told them that if I give them a big serving bowl of Chex Mix they will take and eat a lot more than if I give them a slightly smaller bowl. I demonstrated and showed videos. They broke into groups to figure out how they could let this not happen to them. Then I invited them to a big Super Bowl party. We had huge bowls of Chex Mix in one room and slightly smaller bowls of Chex Mix in the other. Those in the room with the big bowls ate about 200 more calories over the course of the night. When they were leaving, I asked "You ate about 50% more than the group in the other room. Do you think the size of the bowl had anything to do with it?" They said no. They would make random stuff up like, "I didn’t have breakfast last Tuesday!" Mindful eating might work for some people. For those of us who have 10 things going on, I don’t know how we could be much more mindful 21 times a week just for meals, let alone snacks.

  We’ve got wives, we’ve got kids screaming, we’ve got lists that we’re making in our heads in the middle of dinner, we have four phone calls we need to make when we finish. We’re way too busy to do mindful eating, unless you live in a castle by yourself. So for most of us, the solution isn’t information; the solution is simply to change our environment so that it works for us. We find that if you give people short wide glasses rather than tall skinny glasses with the same volume, people end up pouring about 32% more into them. Even bartenders pouring a shot will pour more in a short wide glass than a tall skinny glass. They never look at the width of the glass; they just look at the height. You could say, "I must not over pour every time I have a short wide glass." That’s ridiculous. We’re not going to do that. A better solution is just to get rid of all of your short wide glasses. Now that I’m aware that that could happen it’s not going to happen; of course it’s going to happen. Just change that cue.

  Change the environment. That sounds like it’s the secret.

  The first line of Mindless Eating says the best diet is the diet you don’t know you’re on. I actually started the last chapter by saying it’s easier to change your environment than to change your mind.

  A Few Words on Nutrition

  Most of this book deals with cooking for pleasure and enjoyment, but at the end of the day, it does come down to making sure your body has the nutrients it needs to keep you going and to keep you healthy. Okay, okay; I know... You probably don’t want yet another rant on how you should be eating more veggies. I promise to keep it short.

  While our bodies are amazingly adaptive systems, able to tolerate just about anything in the short term, the general consensus is that you’ll be happier, healthier, and live longer if you eat the right things. What’s "right" isn’t the same for everyone, since genetics, metabolisms, and activity levels differ so much. Nor is it easy to prescribe an exact diet, a "perfect" diet, because the human body seems to adapt so well. Just talk to anyone who’s tried to lose weight. The human body can adapt to a wide range of eating patterns. After all, we have evolved to survive under less-than-ideal situations. There’s even a New York Times article about one guy who lives primarily on candy, and it seems to work for him!

  Still, there are two general rules for nutrition that you should keep in mind: eat the right amount and eat healthy foods. Portion control is a big issue for many Americans, especially as restaurant meals tend to be way larger than they need to be. And it’s easy to plop down on the couch in front of the TV and eat away. You should eat until you’re just full, not until you’re stuffed or your plate is empty. And while there’s no perfect list of foods, you should eat "whole" foods—grains, vegetables, fish, and moderate amounts of meats—and restrict the amount of processed foods, especially those high in sugar, fats, and salt. Personally, I believe eating foods that would have been recognized a century ago is a good rule of thumb.

  We eat for two physiological reasons: to provide our bodies with food to break down into energy (via catabolism), and to provide our cells with the necessary building blocks to synthesize the chemicals that cells need to function (called anabolism). At the simplest level, there are macronutrients (proteins, fats, and carbs) and micronutrients (trace elements, vitamins). Both provide the chemical compounds that your body needs for anabolism, but it’s the macronutrients that provide the energy necessary to read, grocery shop, and cook. As long as you’re ingesting enough (but not too much) of each type of nutrient, your body will be good to go. If you’re regularly cooking balanced meals for yourself, you probably don’t need to worry too much about micronutrients.

  When it comes to measuring the amount of energy in food, the standard unit of measurement used in the United States is the food calorie, equal to 1,000 gram calories (the amount of energy needed to heat 1 gram of water by 1°C). In nutrition, "food calorie" is sometimes capitalized to "Calorie" to distinguish it from a gram calorie and is abbreviated as kcal or C. (Other parts of the world use joules and kilojoules.) How many calories your bo
dy needs depends upon both your body’s base caloric requirements and your activity level. If you’re a desk jockey, you’re probably not burning as many calories as a student running back and forth between classes and the lab. If you routinely eat more calories than your body burns, your body will convert the excess calories into fat, even if the source of those calories wasn’t fat. (Sugary fast-food items labeled "low fat" are not "low fattening.") Eat too few calories, and your body will either lose weight or slow down your metabolism; that is, slow down the rate of chemical reactions related to anabolism and catabolism, leaving you with less energy. Eat far too few calories for an extended period of time and your body will suffer from malnutrition.

  While a calorie is a calorie in the sense of energy, the food you ingest isn’t just about energy. Your body needs various types of nutrients for specific purposes. Protein, for example, provides essential amino acids necessary for building and repairing muscle. If you ate only carbs, you wouldn’t last long! Unless you have particular dietary needs—say, for athletic training or pregnancy—you’re probably getting sufficient quantities of proteins and fats.

  Not all fats are created equal, nor are all carbs the same. As a general rule, you want your fats to be liquid at room temperature (good: olive oil, canola oil; bad: lard, shortening), and you want your carbs to not be white (that is, cut down on white rice, white flour, and sugar). As with so many things in food, it’s the dosage that matters. A little bit of salt won’t hurt you; too much will kill you. Avoid processed foods as much as possible. Most processed foods are engineered for consistency and shelf stability, which usually results in trade-offs of nutritional benefit. Even white flour has its drawbacks: the wheat germ and bran are removed (the oils located in the germ and bran go rancid, so removing them extends shelf life), but the germ and bran are beneficial to our health. Still, if your body needs calories, processed food is better than no food, and the occasional brownie isn’t going to hurt.

  If all of this still leaves you wondering what to cook for dinner, consider what Michael Pollan wrote in the New York Times ("Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch," August 2, 2009):

  I asked [food-marketing researcher Harry Balzer] how, in an ideal world, Americans might begin to undo the damage that the modern diet of industrial prepared food has done to our health.

  "Easy. You want Americans to eat less? I have the diet for you. It’s short and it’s simple. Here’s my diet plan: Cook it yourself. That’s it. Eat anything you want—just as long as you’re willing to cook it yourself."

  Tips for Newbies

  Knowing how to overcome functional fixedness problems such as Duncker’s Candle Problem requires understanding how to read a recipe and break it down into the individual steps, so that you can control and vary the discrete stages. As with any protocol, understanding the structure is critical; you have to understand a system before you can hack it. Here are a few tips for getting yourself in the right state of mind to learn the kitchen equivalents of programming’s "open, read, close":

  Have fun! Learning is about curiosity, not work.

  Know your type. Like to grill? Then grill. Rather bake? Then bake.

  Read the whole recipe before starting, and make sure you understand each step.

  Take time to taste things, both to adjust seasoning and to learn how the taste changes during cooking.

  Don’t be afraid to burn dinner!

  Have fun!

  I was talking with a friend of mine, a fellow geek who was just starting to learn to cook, when he said:

  I was never that curious about cooking, so I thought that buying The Joy of Cooking and going through it would be the right approach. That’s probably like sitting down with Donald Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming in order to learn to program, when really all you should be doing at first is trying to make something you like.

  He’s right: make something you like, give yourself enough time to enjoy the process, and have fun doing it. Slaving through the Joy or Knuth will work, but it’s not the way most people learn to cook or write code. It’d be like picking up a dictionary to learn how to write. The culinary equivalent of The Oxford English Dictionary or The Art of Computer Programming is Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking (Scribner). It’s a fantastic reference and a substantial contribution to our understanding of the everyday processes in food, and you should make space for a copy on your bookshelf. But it is not a book for learning how to cook.

  If there’s one secret about learning how to cook, it’s this: have fun in the kitchen. Go experiment. Play. Take that hacker curiosity that you use in front of the keyboard and bring it with you into the kitchen, to the grocery store, and on your next meal out. Cook to please yourself. Doing someone else’s work is nowhere near as much fun as working on your own projects, and it’s no different in the kitchen: pick something you want to learn how to cook and try making it.

  Caught between two different ways of cooking something? Do an A/B test: make it one way, then a second way, and see which works better.

  Don’t cook a new dish for an important guest. If you’re nervous about how it’ll turn out, cook for just yourself, so you don’t have to worry about trying to impress someone (especially a potential romantic interest!). It’s entirely okay to screw up and toss it in the trash; it’s no different than a programmer refactoring code. Most people’s first drafts of software, food, or books need refinement before they’re ready to ship. Sure, it’ll hurt a little on the wallet, but it’s not wasted: you did learn something, yes? Success!

  Finally, don’t expect your cooking to taste exactly like restaurant or packaged foods. For one, a lot of commercial cooking is designed to appeal to the palette via a salty, fatty, or sugary assault on the senses. Tasty? Yes. Healthy? Not exactly. Learning to cook is a great way to control what you eat and, by extension, your health.

  Know your type

  There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide people into two kinds, and those who don’t. Or is it 10 types: those who know binary, and those who don’t? All joking aside, "binning" yourself into the right category will make the learning process a whole heck of a lot easier. And in case you’re the irreverent type who insists you don’t fit into any standard category, work with me here. Consider the following: vi or emacs? Windows or Mac? PHP or Python? Sure, you might not have strong preferences, but it’s still clear that divisions exist.

  The culinary world has its divisions, too. The biggest one in the professional world is that of cooks versus bakers. Cooks have a reputation for an intuitive, "toss it into the pot" approach, adding a pinch of this or a dash of that to "course-correct" along the way. Bakers are stereo-typically described as precise, exact in their measurements, and methodically organized. Even culinary schools such as Le Cordon Bleu split their programs into cooking ("cuisine") and baking ("patisserie"). But this is probably due to the differences in technique and execution. Cooking is split into two stages: prep work and then an on-demand, line-cook portion. Pastry and baking is almost always done production-style, completed in advance of when the order comes in.

  This isn’t to say that professional cooks hate baking, or that bakers don’t enjoy cooking. But if you find yourself dipping your finger into the cake batter and being tempted to add more of this or that, pay attention to what it means. If you’re the type who really likes to have an exact set of instructions to follow, taking the guesswork out of the process, learn to relax and develop your kitchen instincts when whipping up a dinner. Give yourself permission to dislike some parts of cooking. For most of us, it’s a hobby, not a profession, so it’s okay to skip the culinary equivalent of documenting your code.

  What Type of Cook Are You?

  When I prepare a meal, I typically:

  Rely on classic dishes my family has always enjoyed

  Substitute more healthful ingredients

  Follow a recipe step-by-step

  Rarely use recipes and like to experiment

  Go all out and try t
o impress my guests

  Some of my favorite ingredients are:

  Lots of bread, starches, and red meat

  Fish and vegetables

  Beef and chicken

  Vegetables, spices, and unusual ingredients

  A trendy ingredient I saw on the Food Network

  In my free time I like to:

  Visit with friends and family

  Exercise or take a fitness class

  Organize the house

  Take part in creative or artistic pursuits

  Be spontaneous and seek adventure

  My favorite things to cook are:

  Home-baked goodies

  Foods with fresh ingredients and herbs

  Casseroles

  Ethnic foods and wok dishes

  Anything that lets me fire up the grill

  Other people describe me as:

  Really friendly

  Health-conscious

  Diligent and methodical

  Curious

  Intense

  There may be overlap in the answers you give, but is there one letter that you picked most often? Here’s what your answers say about your cooking style: