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

by Jeff Potter

  This particular preparation was kind of runny and soft and white, a lot like the grits that I grew up with in the South. I sat in the middle of this assembly line of women all wearing their brightly colored woven blouses as they glopped a big dollop of that soft white corn into big green leaves from the corn plant. Then they added a little bit of meat and sauce, and then they tied them all up and steamed them.

  A few days later we drove back into Guatemala City, where we stayed with a nonindigenous family. The house was just packed to the gills with tamales that were purchased from local vendors. When a guy is on the street walking around with a bag of tamales, the answer is always yes. They have a million different kinds of tamales that are prepared for Christmas in that country alone. I remember sitting at some Christmas celebrations there, too. We’re sitting there at the table and there’s sheets of all these different kinds of tamales. One of the Guatemalan people at the table said, "What the hell is in this? Cherries?" That’s the kind of sweet and savory Guatemalan tamale you can get for Christmas.

  I can’t get enough of that in the same way that I frequently fall down these Internet search rabbit holes when I’m just chilling out thinking about what kind of yummy, healthy food I’m going to prepare for my family and friends. I love exploring food in traditional cultures as a part of the reporting that I do, and I love exploring food back here. It’s a fairly important part of my life.

  Seasonal Method

  Cooking "within season" means using only those ingredients that have good, fresh flavor and are ripe. Restricting yourself to ingredients that are in season in your region is a great way of creating constant challenges and exposing yourself to new ingredients. And because in-season ingredients tend to be of higher quality and pack more of a flavor punch, it’s that much easier to make the resulting dishes taste good. Next time you’re at the grocery store, take note of what new fruits and vegetables have arrived and what is in dwindling supply.

  Of course, not every ingredient in a dish is a "seasonal" ingredient. Cellar onions, storage apples, and pantry goods such as rice, flour, and beans are year-round staples and fair game. What is off-limits with this approach are those foods that are outside their growing season for where you live. Put another way, don’t try making grilled peaches in February. Even if you can get a peach in February, it won’t have the same flavor as a mid-summer peach, so it will invariably taste flat. Even if those peaches shipped from Chile taste okay, they won’t be as good as the local in-season peaches, because they have to be of a variety that favors shipping durability and disease resistance over taste and texture. (Unless you happen to live in Chile.)

  One of the perks of using in-season ingredients, besides the quality, is that the abundance of the in-season produce generally means lower prices, too, as the supply-and-demand curves change. Grocery stores have to figure out how to sell all those zucchinis when they come up for harvest, and running specials is one of the standard ways of moving product. The same challenge applies even more if you’re growing your own fruits and vegetables, because a home garden can produce an abundance over a short period of time. If you figure out what to do with the 100 pounds of zucchini that all come ready in late summer, I know plenty of people who would like to hear it!

  Note

  In-season, local foods have the advantage of typically being fresher than their conventional counterparts, which is especially important for flavor in highly perishable foods such as heirloom tomatoes and fresh seafood. Local isn’t always better, though. For example, if you live in a northern climate, you might find that produce such as radishes from traditional farms located where it gets hotter might taste better.

  Caterina Fake’s Roasted Potatoes

  Caterina Fake cofounded the photo-sharing site Flickr (http://www.flickr.com) and Hunch (http://hunch.com), a decision-making site. She also serves on the board of directors for both Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org) and Etsy (http://www.etsy.com).

  Tell me about what role food and cooking play in your life.

  I never considered myself to be much of a cook, but at some point I realized that I was a much better cook than I had thought I was. It was a revelation to me. I had mostly been cooking family recipes that had been handed down; I didn’t refer much to cookbooks. I’ve been told by guests to my house that I was a better cook than I thought I was and it took me a while to come around to actually believing that. It came very gradually over time, adding one recipe a year maybe, but over time you get many, many recipes.

  Why did you think that you weren’t a good cook?

  Just because I cooked such simple things, using such simple ingredients. I would get waxy potatoes and cut them up and put olive oil on them with rosemary and garlic and salt and pepper and grill them and for whatever reason I didn’t think that that qualified. My mother would occasionally do these incredible James Beard and Julia Child recipes, these elaborate recipes that took hours and hours of preparation and special ingredient shopping and that was what qualified as good cooking. It was haute cuisine, whereas the kind of cooking that I always did was just put something yummy on the table for dinner without a lot of effort.

  I think so often it’s the very simple dishes that actually can be some of the most special, most significant meals of our lives. What created this interest in learning to cook?

  Necessity. I loved having people over and I loved cooking for people. When I was working as a web developer in San Francisco, dinner parties were really my favorite ways of socializing. I would have people over and as a result, I had to learn how to cook. When I lived in New York I actually didn’t cook very much because there are so many restaurants and New York kitchens are so tiny. It’s much more of a dinner party culture here in San Francisco.

  Any parting thoughts that you would like to share?

  I’m very lucky to live in California, where fresh food is plentiful. I started receiving a box of food from the Eat Well Farms CSA. I learned a bunch of new recipes and ways of cooking from having had that basket of vegetables delivered to my doorstep with a bunch of things that I normally would avoid at the grocery store. I didn’t know what to do with fennel. I didn’t know what to do with sweet potatoes. I didn’t know what to do with parsnips. It got me out of my comfort zone and taught me some new ways to think about food. One of my favorite cookbooks is The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters (Clarkson Potter). It would not look down upon my potato recipe. Those are the exact kinds of recipes that it includes. It’s really very intuitive cooking; it gives you a very short list of very simple ingredients from which you can cook a great many things.

  Caterina Fake’s Roasted Potatoes with Garlic and Rosemary

  Cut in half some waxy potatoes, such as yellow potatoes like Yukon Gold, or red potatoes. Blanch the potatoes in a pot of boiling water for a minute or two. Strain the potatoes out and spread them on a cookie sheet. Mix with a generous amount of olive oil and diced-up garlic and rosemary. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

  Place the cookie sheet on the top shelf of an oven set to broil. Once the top side is golden brown and crispy on the outside, turn them over, and broil the other side until done.

  These are great for breakfast or you can have them as a side dish or snack.

  Environmentally Sound Inputs

  First they say farm-raised salmon is better, then it’s wild salmon. Or the blogs light up with posts about how many metric tons of greenhouse gases or gallons of water are associated with producing an average cheeseburger. Then there’s the whole "local food" movement wanting to help with reducing our collective carbon footprint. What’s an environmentally conscious geek to do?

  It depends. How much are you willing to give up?

  Let’s start with the good news, with the greenest of the green: your veggies. Locally grown veggies combined with a minimum of transportation and sold unpackaged are about as good as you can get for the environment, and they’re about as good as you can get for yourself. Look for a farmers’ market in the
summer (or if you’re lucky enough to live in California, year-round). Farmers’ markets are a great way to really understand where your food is coming from. Plus, your local economy will thank you.

  You can also subscribe to a CSA (community-supported agriculture) share, where every week or two you receive a box of local and seasonal produce. It’s a great way to challenge yourself in the kitchen, because invariably something unfamiliar will show up in your CSA share, or you’ll find yourself with 10 pounds of spinach and be looking for something new to do with it. Regardless of anything else, your mother was right: eat your veggies. (On a personal note unrelated to the environment, I believe the typical American diet doesn’t include enough veggies. Eat more veggies! More!)

  In the other corner, there are red meats like corn-fed beef. It’s environmentally expensive to produce: the cow has to eat, and if fed corn (instead of grass), the corn has to be grown, harvested, and processed. All this results in a higher carbon footprint per pound of slaughtered meat than that of smaller animals like chickens. Then there’s the fuel expended in transportation, along with the environmental impact of the packaging. By some estimates, producing a pound of red meat creates, on average, four times the greenhouse-gas emissions as a pound of poultry or fish. See Weber and Matthews’ "Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States" (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es702969f).

  Regardless of where you fall on the spectrum between local-shopping vegan and delighting in a ginormous bacon-wrapped slab of corn-fed beef, limiting consumption in general is the best method for helping the environment. Choose foods that have lower impact on the environment, and be mindful of wasted food. See the caveat below, but current data suggests the total impact on the environment of consuming fish is less than the impact of eating chicken and turkey, which likewise is more sustainable than pork, which is in turn better for the environment than beef.

  This isn’t to say all red meats are bad. If that steak you’re cutting into came from a locally raised, grass-fed cow, she might actually be playing a positive role in the environment by converting the energy stored in grass into fertilizer (i.e., manure) for other organisms to use. See Michael Pollan’s classic The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Penguin) for more on this topic, but as a general rule, the more legs it has, the "less good" it is for the environment. (By this logic, centipedes are pure evil...)

  By most analyses, cutting the amount of red meat you consume is the easiest way to make a positive impact on the environment. One friend of mine follows the "no-buy" policy: he happily eats it, but won’t buy it. I’ve heard of others following variants of Mark Bittman’s "vegan before 6″ diet: limiting consumption of meats during the day but pigging out at dinner.

  With respect to fish, whether farm raised or wild-caught is better depends upon the species of fish, so there’s no good general rule. There are issues with both types: some methods of farm fishing generate pollutants or allow fish to escape and commingle with wild species, while wild-caught contributes to the depletion of the ocean’s stocks, and the impact of a global collapse in the fisheries from over-fishing is a very real threat to the food supply to hundreds of millions. For a good article on fisheries and the global impact of over-fishing, see the New Republic’s "Aquacalypse Now" (http://www.tnr.com/article/environment-energy/aquacalypse-now).

  The biggest contribution you can make—at least on the dinner plate—is to avoid wild-caught seafood of species that are overfished. The Monterey Bay Aquarium runs a great service called "Seafood WATCH" that provides a list of "best," "okay," and "avoid" species, updated frequently and broken out by geographic region of the country. Search online for "seafood watch" or visit http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/seafoodwatch.aspx.

  Data from Google Trends showing search volumes for the terms "peach" (left) and "tomato" (right) for California users and Massachusetts users. The growing season in Massachusetts starts later and is much shorter than in California. There’s a tight correlation of this with Google’s search volumes for those terms.

  If it’s the dead of winter and there’s a foot of snow on the ground (incidentally, not the best time to eat out at restaurants specializing in local, organic fare), finding produce with "good flavor" can be a real challenge. You will have to work harder to produce flavors on par with those in summer meals. Working with the seasons means adapting the menu. There’s a reason why classic French winter dishes like cassoulet (traditionally made with beans and slow-cooked meats, but that description does not do this amazing dish justice—I make mine with duck confit, bacon, sausage, and beans, then slow roast it overnight) and coq au vin (stewed chicken in wine) use cellar vegetables such as onions, carrots, turnips, and potatoes and slow, long-cooking simmers to tenderize tougher cuts of meat. I can’t imagine eating cassoulet mid-summer, let alone venting the heat generated from keeping the oven on for that long. Yet in the dead of winter, nothing’s better.

  Seasonality chart for fruits and vegetables in New England. Fruits have a shorter season than vegetables, and only a few vegetables survive past the first frost. Some plants can’t tolerate the hottest part of the year; others do best during those times. If you live in the Bay Area or New York, see http://www.localfoodswheel.com for a nifty "what’s in season" wheel chart.

  Consider the following three soups: gazpacho, butternut squash, and white bean and garlic. The ingredients used in gazpacho and butternut squash soup are seasonal, so they tend to be made in the summer and autumn, respectively (of course, modern agricultural practices have greatly extended the availability of seasonal ingredients, and your climate might be more temperate than the sources of these traditions). White bean and garlic soup, on the other hand, uses pantry goods that can be had at any time of year. Thus, it is traditionally thought of as a winter soup, because it’s one of the few dishes that can be made that time of year.

  Gazpacho (Summer)

  Purée, using an immersion blender or food processor:

  2 large (500g) tomatoes, peeled, with seeds removed

  Transfer the puréed tomato to a large bowl. Add:

  1 (150g) cucumber, peeled and seeded

  1 cob (125g) corn, grilled or broiled and cut off the cob

  1 (100g) sweet red bell pepper, grilled or broiled

  ½ small (30g) red onion, thinly sliced, soaked in water, and drained

  2 tablespoons (20g) olive oil

  2 cloves (6g) garlic, minced or pressed through a garlic press

  1 teaspoon (4g) white wine vinegar or champagne vinegar

  ½ teaspoon (1g) salt

  Stir to combine. Adjust salt to taste and add ground black pepper as desired.

  Notes

  The weights in this recipe are for the prepared ingredients (i.e., after removing seeds, trimming stems, or soaking).

  If you prefer a smooth gazpacho, purée all of the ingredients at the end. Or, add a portion of the veggies, purée, and then add the remainder to achieve a partly smooth, partly chunky texture. It’s all about your preference!

  Gazpacho is one of those dishes that is really about the fresh ingredients that you have on hand. There’s no mechanical or chemical reason for these quantities to be written as they are, so add more of this, less of that, whatever you like to suit your tastes. Try expanding this recipe to include other ingredients, such as hot peppers or fresh herbs.

  Grilling or broiling the corn and bell peppers adds a smoked flavor to the soup, due to the chemical reactions that take place at higher heat, as we’ll discuss later in this book. You might find you prefer a "raw" version of this soup. Or, if you really like the smoky flavor, try adding some "liquid smoke" to amp it up.

  Note

  Whenever you see a recipe calling for a grilled vegetable, you should default to rubbing it with a light coating of olive oil before grilling it, because this will prevent the vegetable from drying out while cooking.

  How to Peel a Tomato

  I have a friend whose boyfriend tried to make her a surprise din
ner involving tomato soup, but he didn’t know how to peel tomatoes. She came home to find her guy frantically trying to use a vegetable peeler on the tomatoes to no avail...

  To peel tomatoes, drop them in boiling water for a few seconds and then pull them out with tongs or a mesh spider, and then just pull the skins off. You can cut an "x" shape into the skin before blanching, although I find the skin on some varieties of tomatoes will pull back regardless, as long as the water is at a full rolling boil. Experiment to see if it makes a difference!

  Butternut Squash Soup (Fall)

  Purée in a food processor or with an immersion blender:

  2 cups (660g) butternut squash, peeled, cubed, and roasted (about 1 medium squash)

  2 cups (470g) chicken, turkey, or vegetable stock

  1 small (130g) yellow onion, diced and sautéed

  ½ teaspoon (1g) salt (adjust to taste)

  Notes

  As with the gazpacho recipe, the weights are for the prepared ingredients and only rough suggestions. So, prepare each item individually. For example, for the squash, peel it, then coat it with olive oil, sprinkle it with salt, and roast it in the oven at a temperature around 400–425°F / 200–220°C until it begins to brown. When you go to purée the ingredients, hold back some of the squash and some of the stock, taste the purée, and see which you think it needs. Want it thicker? Add more squash. Thinner? Add more stock.