illidanstr:

salt, fat, acid, heat is the cooking book i always wanted but didn’t know what to ask for

it is so good

it explains how cooking works.  which nobody else ever bothers to actually describe in even the most miserable faintest detail.  it is what I was hoping the modernist cuisine books would be:  the equivalent of a description of what the parts of a computer or the function of subnetting in a network but for sauces and meats and vegetables

many things are starting to make sense and I’m barely even into the book.  here is an idea I had: so much “american” food is so lacking in acids, which is why americans are famous for adding ketchup to everything.  is ketchup as the universal sauce for everything you can imagine terrible?  yes.  is that grossly terrible?  obviously.  would a fermented ingredient like pickle, a wine vinegar to baste in, fresh citrus or grated parmesan added after the food is done be better for that specific dish?  yes.  is it better than not having any acid at all?  also yes.  which is why people add ketchup and get used to the habit of doing it; you’ve got salt, umami, sugar, and acid packaged together as an indulgence which can never remove the sins of the cook but can paper over the most egregious violations of decency

(would this explain part of why so many traditional cuisines rely on heavily fermented foods?  if you don’t have the range of acids at hand we do now, you still need some way to kick the whole meal up to par..)

fats greatly enhance flavor and make foods moist.  so when you take out all the fats, like we did with “fat-free” food, you get disgusting dry results.  that’s why Costco food always tastes better than any of the grocery chains; it’s full of cream and butter.  

it even explains why cooking from a recipe is so tortured: there are endless variables in your ingredients and cooking environment you could never ever fix as either the author of the recipe or the person working from it.  do you know from a label exactly how sweet or acidic the specific batch of tomatoes or oranges you are using is when it varies from basket to basket in the orchard? no, but it could be critical.  that’s why your focus has to be on the food; watching it, listening to it, tasting it; the chaos of oven temperatures varying through time and space doesn’t matter quite so much when you have all of the tools at hand to know when to adjust and compensate!

modernist cuisine, in comparison, tries to find ways to statistically monitor and fix the variables using tech (sous vide, obviously – your steak is mathematically guaranteed to end up evenly medium rare all the way through, then you blowtorch it for the sear without the variance of coals on a grill!)  which is also cool, but this! this, is what I was looking for.

Tags:

#food #interesting