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

by Jeff Potter

  This soup by itself is very basic. Garnish with whatever else you have on hand that you think might go well, such as garlic croutons and bacon. Or top with a small dab of cream, some toasted walnuts, and dried cranberries to give it a feeling of Thanksgiving. How about a teaspoon of maple syrup, a few thin slices of beef, and some fresh oregano? Chives, sour cream, and cheddar cheese? Why not! Instead of purchasing items to follow a recipe exactly, try using leftover ingredients from other meals to complement the squash soup.

  If you’re in a rush, you can "jump-start" the squash by microwaving it first. Peel and quarter the squash, using a spoon to scoop out the seeds. Then, cube it into 1–2″ / 3–5 cm pieces, drop it into a glass baking pan that’s both oven and microwave safe, and nuke it for four to five minutes to partially heat the mass. Remove from microwave, coat the squash with olive oil and a light sprinkling of salt, and roast it in a preheated oven until done, about 20 to 30 minutes. If you’re not in a rush, you can skip the peeling step entirely: cut the squash in half, scoop out the seeds, add oil and salt, roast it for about an hour (until the flesh is soft), and use a spoon to scoop it out.

  To cut thick gourds such as squash and pumpkins, use a large chef’s knife and a mallet. First, slice off a thin piece of the gourd so that it lies flat and doesn’t roll, then gently tap the knife blade through the gourd.

  White Bean and Garlic Soup (Winter)

  In a bowl, soak for several hours or overnight:

  2 cups dry white beans, such as cannelloni beans

  After soaking overnight, drain the beans, place them in a pot, and fill it with water (try adding a few bay leaves or a sprig of rosemary). Bring to a boil and simmer for at least 15 minutes. Strain out the water and put the beans back in a pot (if using an immersion blender) or in the bowl of a food processor.

  Add to the pot or bowl with beans and then purée until blended:

  2 cups (500g) chicken or vegetable stock

  1 medium (150g) yellow onion, diced and sautéed

  3 slices (50g) French bread, coated in olive oil and toasted on both sides

  ½ head (25g) garlic, peeled, crushed, and sautéed or roasted

  Salt and pepper, to taste

  Notes

  Don’t skip soaking and boiling the beans. Really. One type of protein present in beans—phytohaemagglutinin—causes extreme intestinal distress. The beans need to be boiled to denature this protein; cooking them in a slow cooker or sous vide setup (see Chapter 7) will not denature the protein and actually makes things worse. If you’re in a rush, use canned white beans; they’ll have already been cooked.

  Variations: try blending some fresh oregano into the soup. Toss some bacon chunks on top or grate on some Parmesan cheese as well. As with many soups, how chunky versus how creamy to blend the soup is a personal preference.

  Make sure to toast the French bread to a nice golden brown. This will add the complex flavors from caramelization and Maillard reactions in the sugars and proteins from the bread. You can pour olive oil onto a flat plate and dip the bread in to coat it.

  If you’re not much of a soup person, try making savory sorbets using seasonal ingredients. A summer sorbet with tomatoes and tarragon? Yum. Carrot ice cream? Why not? And for winter, while unusual, bacon ice cream has been enjoyed by diners at Chef Heston Blumenthal’s UK-based restaurant The Fat Duck, and taken further with candied bacon bits in a recipe on David Lebovitz’s blog (search online for "candied bacon ice cream recipe").

  Finally, here are a few tips related to seasonality to keep in mind:

  Use fresh herbs whenever possible, because most dried herbs don’t have anywhere near the strength of flavor. The volatile oils that are responsible for so much of the aromas in herbs oxidize and break down, meaning that the dry herbs are a pale substitute. Dried herbs have their place, though; it makes sense to use dried herbs in the dead of winter when annual plants like basil aren’t in season. Store dry herbs in a cold, dark place (not above the stove!) to limit the amount of heat and light, which contribute to the breakdown of organic compounds in spices.

  Grind your own spices as much as possible. Fresh-grated nutmeg will be much stronger than preground nutmeg, for the same reasons that many fresh herbs are better than their dried counterparts: the aromatic compounds in a preground spice will have had time to either hydrate or oxidize and disperse, resulting in flavor loss. Most spices also benefit from being bloomed—cooked in oil under moderate but not scorching heat—as a way of releasing their volatile chemicals without breaking them down.

  If you’re looking for convenience, commercially frozen vegetables and fruits are actually pretty good. Freezing produce right when it is harvested has a few advantages: nutritional breakdown is halted, and the frozen item is from the peak of the season while the fresh version in your store may have been harvested early or late. Using frozen produce is especially useful if you’re cooking for just yourself, because you can pull out a single portion at a time. If you’re growing your own food and intend to freeze it, look up online how to use dry ice to pack and quick-freeze the produce; freezing in your home freezer takes too long and leads to mushy veggies.

  When selecting produce at the store, think about when you’ll want to use it. For example, if you’re buying bananas to eat throughout the week, instead of buying one cluster of mostly green bananas, buy two smaller clusters, one mostly yellow (for sooner) and one mostly green (for later). Picking in-season produce and selecting it so that it will be ripe when you’re ready to use it are good ways to guarantee quality.

  Organic Versus Conventional

  Organic foods are those grown or raised to USDA National Organic Program (NOP) regulations on farms or ranches certified as following those regulations. Organic produce has restrictions on which pesticides can be used; animals butchered for organic meats are required to be given access to the outdoors and are prohibited from being given antibiotics or growth hormones. Because of these restrictions, the cost of producing organic food is typically higher.

  Conventional foods are those not certified for sale under the label organic, regardless of whether they are grown to the same standards and regardless of their place of origin. They must still be grown to acceptable USDA/FDA standards, though.

  When it comes to produce, just because it’s organic doesn’t mean it’s automatically safer, just as software labeled as open source isn’t necessarily of higher quality than proprietary software. Of course, there are other reasons to buy organic, but if your concern is food safety and pesticides, the benefit of organic isn’t necessarily clear-cut: whether exposure to traditional pesticides is always worse for you than exposure to their organic replacements is not yet known. The detectable levels of pesticides in our bodies are well below anything approaching toxic, and as chemists have told me, "it’s the dosage that matters." To put some numbers to it, consider what Dr. Belitz et al. wrote in Food Chemistry (Springer): "[T]he natural chemicals [in a cup of coffee] that are known carcinogens are about equal to a year’s worth of synthetic pesticide residues that are carcinogens."

  Given the option, farmers would rather not have to spray any type of pesticide on their crops: it costs money, takes time, and increases their exposure to the chemicals. Just keep in mind that if there were an easy answer—say, if organic practices were always better and always cheaper—everyone would be doing it that way.

  If you do feel going organic is for you but are on a tight budget, here are some general rules of thumb. For fruits, if you’re going to eat the skin, buy organic. If you’re going to peel them, buying organic appears to offer comparatively little advantage when it comes to exposure to pesticides. For veggies, organic bell pepper, celery, kale, and lettuce test as having lower levels of pesticides than their conventional counterparts. Go organic for dairy, eggs, and meats; for seafood, see the previously mentioned Monterey Bay Aquarium’s "Seafood WATCH" program at http://www.seafoodwatch.com.

  If you’re interested in seeing for yourself if organic food taste
s different from conventional food, try this side-by-side experiment. Make two versions of a simple pasta dish with sautéed chicken and red and yellow bell peppers, using organic ingredients in one and conventional in the other. How does organic chicken compare to conventional chicken? Can you taste the difference in the bell peppers? For that authentic scientific experience, serve the side-by-side meal to a bunch of friends without revealing which bowl contains the organic version to run a true "taste test." You might find the variance in flavor to be greater—or less—than you expect.

  Tim Wiechmann’s Beet Salad

  Chef Wiechmann is the chef and owner of T.W. Food in Cambridge, MA. He creates his menus using local organic produce with a classic French approach.

  How you go from planning a dish to putting it on the table?

  I start with the ingredients—they all have to be in season. I came up with a dish that was made with leftover cheese from the Pyrénées. Black cherries and beets are in season, so how can I dress up a beet salad? In the Pyrénées, they have cherries with sheep’s milk cheese. Most of my stuff comes from cultural things, from traveling all over and having a sound grasp on food in Europe. I study what people make from all over—they do this here, they do that there. And these things are done for thousands of years. I try to have a knowledge of these things and then I just look at my own ingredients here, and I draw them together.

  What is your approach in the kitchen and what thoughts do you have on technology in the kitchen?

  My menu is actually really difficult. My employees start out with this picture that we just dig out a carrot and boil it. We don’t do that. Everything goes through a rigorous, precise set of cooking parameters. With certain preparations, time and temperature are everything. There are things like the water circulator you can use to cook all the meats and fishes perfectly every time. Even for cutting things, we use rulers and metal caramel cutters.

  Observation is critical, as is getting experience in knowing what looks good. If you’re cooking an onion, it changes color over time. There are certain stages where you want to pull it because the bitterness increases as the caramelization increases. Onions in a tall pot will sweat differently than onions in wide pot. In a tall pot, they release their own water and cook evenly because the water doesn’t disappear. We have specific pots that are good for certain things—sweat the onions in this pot; don’t use that pot—but a new cook will just grab any pot.

  How do you know if something is going to work?

  You just try. When you start to play the piano, you don’t know where the notes are. You have to have the technique, then you can think about putting the notes together. If I hit this note, then I’ll get this sound; if I want onions to be sweet, I’ll caramelize them. The technique follows the knowledge. I keep a log of my own recipes and times for each thing. How long to put cherries or apples in a bag and cook in the water circulator, that comes out of experience.

  My big thing I always say: "Get into it and go for it." Just buy it and try it. Every time you cook something—even if you burn it and it goes in the trash—it’s not a failure, it’s just: next time I’m not going to burn it.

  Out of all these criteria that make for a good evening, clearly food is an important one, but what do you think people underestimate?

  Little things. Maybe they don’t know why they don’t like something. You know what I mean? "Well, I’m not sure. I just didn’t like it." I think very few people know what they like and can identify what they like. That’s why I’m pretty good at what I do—I really know what I like. Do you know what you like?

  I’ll have to give it some thought.

  I don’t know what I like in the visual art world. I just haven’t spent enough time on it.

  I can answer that one on the visual art world. Anything that prompts an emotional response. It might not be a positive emotion, but it should stir an emotion or create an experience. Have you seen Ratatouille?

  Yes.

  The scene where the camera zooms into the critic’s eye and goes back to his childhood as he’s eating ratatouille. He has an experience. For me, food needs to touch on emotions.

  Everybody is geared with that, but I think a lot of people don’t know how to identify that. They’ll say, "I don’t like cauliflower." One really great French chef taught me that you don’t have to like it, you just have to make it good. He said, "taste this," to which I said, "I don’t like it; I don’t want to taste it." He yelled at me. "You’re going to be a chef and you can’t taste it? You have to taste it." I’ll never forget him screaming at me.

  I think this would apply if you’re cooking for friends: keep in mind what your friends are going to enjoy.

  That’s right. My job is to make something that people will enjoy.

  Roasted Red and Candystripe Beet Salad with Almond Flan, Black Cherry Compote, and Ossau-Iraty

  Serves 8; Prep time: 2 hours.

  Prepare the cherry compote. In a container, measure out and soak overnight:

  4 cups (600g) pitted black cherries

  1 ⅔ cups (340g) sugar

  1 tablespoon (10g) apple pectin

  2 vanilla beans, sliced open lengthwise

  After soaking overnight, transfer to a pan, add the zest and juice of a lemon, and cook over medium heat for an hour, until the mixture reaches a jam-like consistency. Transfer to a plastic container or jar and cool.

  Prepare the flan. In a blender, combine:

  1 cup (150g) almonds, toasted

  1 teaspoon (5g) almond extract

  6 medium (330g) eggs

  2 cups (480g) heavy cream

  Nutmeg, salt, pepper to taste

  Pour onto a quarter sheet pan (9″ × 13″ / 23 cm × 33 cm) lined with a Silpat or parchment paper and bake at 300°F / 150°C until the custard sets, about 45 minutes. Cool on the sheet in refrigerator.

  Prepare the beets. Preheat oven to 450°F / 230°C. Create a foil pouch containing:

  6 medium (500g) red beets

  6 medium (500g) candystripe beets (also known as chioggia beets)

  Salt, olive oil, and pepper to taste

  Roast until tender, about 45 minutes, depending on the size of the beets. Remove from pouch and peel with a knife. Cut the beets into attractive circles or cubes.

  To serve. Make a quick salad dressing with oil and vinegar, salt and pepper. Toss the beets and 1 cup / 90g of toasted slivered almonds in the dressing.

  Arrange the beets and almonds on large plates. Place a nice slice of flan somewhere among them and drop a few scoops of the cherry compote in various places.

  Using a vegetable peeler, shave into long strands (about 4″ / 10 cm):

  ½ pound (225g) Ossau-Iraty (a medium-soft cheese from the French Pyrénées, creamy and complex)

  Decorate the salad with the shaved Ossau-Iraty.

  RECIPE USED BY PERMISSION OF TIM WIECHMANN

  Genetically Modified Foods

  Regardless of your feelings about or definition of GMO (genetically modified organism) foods, the topic is an intensely charged political and social minefield. Fear of the unknown has a long record of helping to guarantee the survival of our species, so avoiding things until they’ve established a history of being safe does certainly seem prudent. But this view doesn’t consider the potential harms that a GMO-based food might be able to avert.

  What if a strain of rice could be produced that was more resilient in the face of floods and droughts? Such a strain of rice would increase crop yields for families in impoverished countries, and the need is only going to increase. The United Nations’ food agency expects that worldwide food production will need to increase by 70% between 2010 and 2050. Or how about strains of rice or corn that need fewer pesticides to remain viable crops? Worldwide, some 300,000 deaths a year are attributed to pesticide poisoning.

  Then there’s "Golden Rice," a golden-yellow rice that has been genetically modified to produce increased amounts of beta-carotene as a way of addressing Vitamin A deficiencies that impact t
he extremely poor in some nations. Everyone agrees that Vitamin A deficiencies are a serious problem: an estimated 1 to 2 million children die every year due to Vitamin A deficiency, according to a 1992 World Health Organization report. Still, Golden Rice has not yet been approved for human consumption; organizations like Greenpeace have opposed it, saying that it’s an unproven solution and that other, better solutions exist.

  More personally, would you accept genetically engineered cows guaranteed to be free of prions, which cause Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (a.k.a. "mad cow disease")? Or how about a GMO banana that was able to withstand the fungus Fusarium oxysporum that threatens to wipe out the banana as we know it? Related to GMO foods, would you accept irradiated chicken if it was guaranteed to be free of salmonella?

  This isn’t to suggest that you should seek out GMO-based foods; but at the very least you should recognize that there are very real trade-offs. Hundreds of Americans die annually from salmonellosis, and while those deaths can be avoided with proper cooking, perhaps we as a society shouldn’t blindly fear technologies that could prevent those deaths just because they’re unfamiliar.