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

by Jeff Potter

  We did one where we were testing whether or not you could tenderize steaks with explosives. We had to figure out what tenderness is. The problem is you can give two different people each a piece of steak from the same cut compared to a piece of steak from a different cut, and they might come up with two different assessments of which one is more tender. We actually did a whole day of testing that didn’t end up on film because we realized we were using the wrong parameters for assessing steak tenderness. The USDA actually has a machine for testing the tenderness of steak that measures the pounds of force it takes to punch a hole through a steak. We replicated that machine and to our great surprise, it worked exactly as it was supposed to. Coming up with something for $50 that equals the USDA testing equipment: that was thrilling!

  How can testing a myth translate into learning more about cooking?

  Changing one variable is probably the single hardest thing for people to understand. Change only one variable. It’s not like changing only a small number of variables; it’s really changing one variable at a time, because only then do you know what caused the change between your first test and your second test. You get so much clarity from the process that way.

  I’m an avid cook. My wife and I both cook a lot of elaborate things, and we really do love playing around with single variables, changing things and learning how things work. We were reading Thomas Keller, and he talked about how salt is a flavor enhancer, and he mentioned that vinegar does a similar thing. It doesn’t add a new taste, but it often alters the taste that’s there. My wife was making a cauliflower soup, and it was kind of bland. I didn’t want to put any more salt in it, because I could tell it was about to go in the wrong direction. We tossed in a little bit of vinegar and the whole thing just woke up. It was thrilling! I love that.

  Have you done other myths related to food?

  We have—certainly a whole bunch of drinking myths. We did poppy seed bagels to see if eating a poppy seed bagel causes you to test positive for heroin, which is absolutely true. In fact, parolees are completely forbidden from eating poppy seed bagels. They’re told if you test positive for drugs, we are not going to wonder why. You are just going to go back to jail, so make it easy, don’t eat poppy seeds.

  I had a whole episode written called the surreal gourmet, which ended with tenderizing steak with dynamite, but it had all those other things like poaching fish on your catalytic converter or cooking eggs in your dishwasher. Jamie loves the idea of tenderizing meat in the dryer.

  I thought of roasting almonds in a dryer, but not tenderizing meat.

  Also, the idea of is it safe to eat fresh road kill. We think that would be just hilarious and gross.

  The problem-solving aspect of the show is really fascinating. Do you have any advice on how to get to where you want to be when problems arise?

  The first thing to realize is that you’re not going to end up where you think. The world is smarter than you are. A craftsman isn’t somebody who never screws up. A craftsman screws up just as much as you do. They can just see it coming, and can adjust; it’s an ongoing process. Everybody’s oven heats at a different rate. You open it up to check, the temperature drops. There are all sorts of variables. Maybe it’s humid, maybe it’s not. Humidity was affecting all sorts of my wife’s cookie recipes. People tend to overfocus on the final product, when you’ve got to be awake to the process. So problem solving doesn’t mean doing whatever it takes to get to the end result; it means following the path that you’re on. You’re going to probably end up changing your definition of what the result is before you’re done.

  The better you get, the more that things start to turn out like you planned. When my wife started doing really serious baking, I couldn’t believe how much of a difference just having all your ingredients at room temperature made in terms of the emulsifying and chemical reactions—getting the doughs flaky, for instance. Just the simple thing of pulling all of your ingredients out of the refrigerator an hour before you start cooking has a massive effect on the final product. Or things like certain kinds of berries in certain kinds of pastries; the acidity of the berries means having to add more baking soda. I love that. You just have to learn as you go.

  What do you enjoy cooking?

  My favorite thing to cook of all is eggs. After years of practice, I’ve almost mastered the pan flip for an omelet without the spatula. I’ve actually held brunches for 15 people where the theme was "come and I’ll cook you eggs any way you want." My kids are both really getting into it now. They wake up (they’re 10-year-old twins) and they both have their specific ways that they like cooking eggs. My son Addison prefers the hobo egg, in which you cut a hole out of a piece of bread and fry an egg in that hole, and my son Riley likes scrambled eggs. He likes them a little bit on the hard side, but I’m trying to teach him not to cook them too much.

  That does seem to be a common affliction, overcooking eggs and getting dry scrambled eggs.

  With enough sauce, they’d work, but when you start to cook them right, it turns out that there is this tiny band in which they’re unbelievably good. That’s why I like the eggs. They’re kind of unforgiving in some ways and that’s really exciting.

  One of the great things about cooking is that, unless you’re doing something really specifically unforgiving, most recipes are really quite impressively forgiving. That’s a part I really love. You can change all sorts of variables and it still comes out pretty darn good. It’s a great test platform.

  How do you learn from the things that don’t succeed?

  I hand-whipped my first whipped cream about six or seven years ago. I whipped it, and the very first thing I did once it was whipped was I whipped it too far on purpose. I thought, "I know this is perfect, but I want to know where the line is," and I just kept on going until I had butter. It was surprisingly fast and taught me a really clear thing about exactly where you can go with whipping cream.

  Whipped cream tastes great. Flavoring it and sweetening it is just trivial. If you’re good, you can do it almost as fast as it takes to get the mixers and the bowls out and do it all mechanically. It’s a lovely thing to sit there and talk to your guests while you’re hand-whipping cream.

  Making Whipped Cream

  You can whisk up whipped cream by hand in less time than it takes to get an electric mixer out. Start with a cold bowl (chill it in the freezer for a few minutes, ideally), add either heavy cream or whipping cream, and whisk until the cream holds its shape. Add a spoonful of sugar and a little vanilla extract for a sweeter-tasting version. For more on what happens to cream during whisking, see Stirring and Whisking in Chapter 5.

  30 seconds: still liquid; light bubbles.

  60 seconds: still liquid; light bubbles.

  90 seconds: thin cream, would be great on berries.

  120 seconds: whipped, soft peaks. Add some vanilla and sugar, and you’re good to go.

  150 seconds: overbeaten, a little buttery flavored.

  180 seconds: whipped butter.

  Chapter 2. Initializing the Kitchen

  FIGURING OUT WHICH TOOLS TO HAVE IN THE KITCHEN CAN BE A DAUNTING TASK, ESPECIALLY IF YOU’RE JUST STARTING OUT. With so many products on the market, the number of decisions to be made can overwhelm anyone, especially overly analytical perfectionists (you know who you are). What type of knife should I buy? Which pan is right for me? Where should I store my cherry pitter?

  Take a deep breath and relax. To a newbie, kitchen equipment probably seems like the key to success in the kitchen, but in all honesty, kitchen equipment isn’t that important. Two sharp knives, two pots, two pans, a spoon to stir and a spatula to flip, and you’re covered for 90% of the recipes out there and have a better kitchen setup than 90% of the world. Heck, in some parts of the world it’s just one pot and a spatula that’s been sharpened on one side to double as a knife. I know one culinary pro who backpacked through New Zealand for a year; she narrowed it down to a paring knife, vegetable peeler, heatproof spatula, and cutting board. S
till, while having great kitchen equipment won’t make or break you, having the right tool for the job, and one that you’re comfortable with, does make the experience more enjoyable.

  Back to the list of questions. The right answer to any question on which piece of kitchen equipment to use is: whatever works for you, is comfortable, and is safe. This chapter will cover the basic must-haves, but ultimately it is up to you to experiment and to adapt and modify these suggestions to fit your needs and tastes. The one consistent piece of advice I can give is use common sense.

  In addition to the basic essentials, this chapter also provides some common sense tips on storage, kitchen organization, and other things to keep in mind if you’re new to cooking, and maybe a few new ideas for the already initiated.

  Approaching the Kitchen

  So you’ve picked out a recipe to start with and you’re raring to go. Now what? Beyond the grocery shopping list, there are a few things you can do before putting the knife to the cutting board to avoid mishaps while cooking.

  Calibrating Your Instruments

  A scientist can only run experiments and make observations up to the level of accuracy that his equipment allows. This isn’t to say that you need to approach the kitchen with the same rigor that a scientist shows at the lab bench, but if you’re trying to bake cookies or roast a chicken and your oven is off by 50°F / 28°C, your results will be less than desirable. The largest variance in most kitchen equipment is usually the oven, and it can be hard to tell if your oven is running cold or hot just by feel. (Dull knives are also a common misdemeanor; more on that later.) Check and calibrate your oven using an oven thermometer. On the road visiting someone and don’t trust their oven? See The Two Things You Should Do to Your Oven RIGHT NOW, below, for instructions on calibrating an oven using sugar.

  The Two Things You Should Do to Your Oven RIGHT NOW

  One piece of equipment that you’re probably stuck with is your oven. What makes an oven "good" is its ability to accurately measure and regulate heat. Since so many reactions in cooking are about controlling the rate of chemical reactions, an oven that keeps a steady temperature and isn’t too cold or too hot can make a huge difference in your cooking and baking.

  Improve your oven’s recovery time and even out the heat: keep a pizza stone in the oven. Say you’re baking cookies: oven set to 350°F / 180°C, cookies on pan, ready to go. In an empty oven, the only thing hot is the air and the oven walls, and opening the door to pop the cookies in leaves you with just hot oven walls. I find I get much better results by keeping a pizza stone on the very bottom rack in my oven, with a rack directly above it. (Don’t place the cookie sheet directly on the pizza stone!)

  The pizza stone does two things. First, it acts as a thermal mass, meaning faster recovery times for the hot air lost when you open the door to put your cookies in. Second, if you have an electric oven, the pizza stone serves as a diffuser between the heating element and the bottom of your baking tray. The heating element emits a hefty kick of thermal radiation, which normally hits the bottom side of whatever pan or bakeware you put in the oven. By interposing between the heating element and the tray, the pizza stone blocks the direct thermal radiation and evens out the temperature, leading to a more uniform heat. For this reason, you should go for a thick, heavy pizza stone; they’re less likely to crack, too. I’ve turned crappy ovens that burned everything into perfectly serviceable ones capable of turning out even "picky" dishes like soufflés just by adding a pizza stone. Just remember that like any thermal mass, a pizza stone will add lag to heating up the oven, so make sure to allow extra time to preheat your oven.

  Calibrate your oven using sugar. I know this sounds crazy, and yes, you should get an oven thermometer. But how do you know that the oven thermometer is right? My three thermometers—an IR thermometer, a probe thermometer, and the oven’s digital thermometer—have registered temperatures of 325°F / 163°C, 350°F / 177°C, and 380°F / 193°C, all at the same time. (They’re all designed for accurate readings in different temperature ranges.)

  It’s common practice to calibrate thermometers with ice water and boiling water because the temperatures are based on physical properties. Sugar has a similar property and can be used for checking the accuracy of your oven thermometer. Sucrose (table sugar) melts at 367°F / 186°C. It turns from a powdered, granulated substance to something resembling glass. (Caramelization is different from melting; caramelization is due to the sugar molecules decomposing—literally losing their composition—and happens over a range of temperatures coincidentally near the melting point.)

  Pour a spoonful of sugar into an oven-safe glass bowl or onto some foil on a cookie sheet and place in your oven, set to 350°F / 177°C. Even after an hour, it should still be powdered. It might turn slightly brown due to decomposition, but it shouldn’t melt. If it does, your oven is too hot. Next, turn your oven up to 375°F / 190°C. The sugar should completely melt within 15 minutes or so. If it doesn’t, your oven is calibrated too cold. Check to see if your oven has either an adjustment knob or a calibration offset setting; otherwise, just keep in mind the offset when setting the temperature. Note that your oven will cycle a bit above and below the target temperature: the oven will overshoot its target temperature, then turn off, cool down, turn back on, etc. It’s possible that your oven could be "correctly" calibrated but still melt the sugar when set to 350°F / 177°C due to this overshooting, but it would have to overshoot by about 15°F / 8°C.

  Sugar at 350°F / 177°C.

  Sugar at 375°F / 190°C.

  Prepping Ingredients

  When making a meal, start by prepping your ingredients before you begin the cooking process. Read through the entire recipe, and get out everything you need so you don’t have to go hunting in the cupboards or the fridge halfway through. Making stir-fry? Slice the vegetables into a bowl and set it aside before you start cooking. In some cases, you can do the prep work well in advance of when you start cooking the meal. Restaurants wash, cut, and store ingredients hours or even days ahead of when they’re needed. The stages of prepping and cooking are like the stages of compiling and executing in software programming. If compiling is looking through all the steps and assembling the instructions into a single stream of optimized commands that are ready to be executed, the prep stage of cooking is similarly "precomputing" as much of the work as possible so that, when it’s time to fire off the recipe, you can execute it as quickly and easily as possible.

  The mise en place technique (French for "put in place") involves laying out all the ingredients and utensils needed to cook a dish before starting. Think of it like cache priming in computer programming: mise en place is equivalent to prefetching the various bits you’ll need while executing to avoid cache misses. If you are going to prepare the same dish multiple times (say, omelets for a large brunch), having a bunch of containers ready with the various fillings in them will allow you to work quickly. Mise en place isn’t an absolute necessity, although it does generally make the cooking process smoother. Measure out the ingredients at this stage whenever possible; this way you’ll have a chance to discover if you’re short of a critical ingredient (or if it’s gone bad!) before committing to the cooking process. It also helps avoid those panicked moments of trying to locate a strainer that’s wandered off while a sauce that needs immediate straining cools down. (Happens to me all the time...) Sure, a "just-in-time" approach is fine for simple meals. However, if you’re cooking for a large number of people or attempting a particularly complicated menu, keep the mise en place approach in mind.

  Kitchen Equipment

  Regardless of your needs, a well-equipped home kitchen shouldn’t cost much money. I once heard the products sold in consumer kitchen stores described as "kitchen jewelry." Stores like Williams-Sonoma offer beautiful products that make for beautiful gifts, but just because they call their products "professional-quality cookware" doesn’t mean that professionals routinely use them. Sure, their kitchenware is beautiful and functional, but
if you’re willing to settle for just functionality and skip the bling factor, you can save a bundle.

  If you live in a large city, look for a restaurant supply store. These stores stock aisle after aisle of every conceivable cooking, serving, and dining room product, down to the "Please wait to be seated" signs. If you can’t find such a store, next time you eat out, ask your waiter to ask the kitchen staff. If that fails, the Internet, as they say, "is your friend."

  If you do get stuck or want recommendations of which features to look for in a product, look at recent reviews from Adam Ried of America’s Test Kitchen and Cook’s Illustrated or Alton Brown of Good Eats. Products continually change as manufacturers revise, update, and improve their offerings, so don’t be surprised if specific models you read about are no longer available. Common sense and thinking about your requirements are really all you need, though.

  Storage Tips for Perishable Foods

  Should you wash your produce when you unpack your weekly groceries or at time of use? And how should you store various other foods? Here’s a look at basic storage rules, from most to least perishable.

  Seafood. Seafood is the most perishable item you’re likely to handle. Ideally, seafood should be used on the day of purchase. A day or two longer is okay, but past that point enzymes and spoilage bacteria begin to break down amine compounds, resulting in that undesirable fishy odor.

  Fun science fact: Fish live in an environment that is roughly the same temperature as your fridge. The specific activity of some enzymes is much higher in fish than mammals at these temperatures. Putting seafood on ice buys a bit more time by increasing the activation energy needed for these reactions. Meat is already far enough away from the ideal reaction temperatures that the few extra degrees gained by storing it on ice don’t change much.