food when heating it. Just like light or heat, microwaves are a form of electromagnetic radiation. When microwaves are aimed at an object with magnetically charged particles (like, say, the water in a piece of food), those particles rapidly flip back and forth, creating friction, which, in turn, creates heat.
Microwaves can pass through most solid objects to a depth of at least a few centimeters or so. This is why microwaves are a particularly fast way to heat up foods—you don’t need to wait for the relatively slow transfer of energy from the exterior to the center.
Phew! Enough with the science lesson already, right?
Bear with me. Things are about to get a lot more fun!
EXPERIMENT:
Temperature Versus Energy in
• One 3-quart saucier or saucepan filled with water
• 1 accurate instant-read thermometer Procedure
Turn your oven on to 200°F and let it preheat. Now open the oven door, stick your hand inside, and keep your hand in the oven until it gets too hot to withstand. A tough guy like you could probably leave it in there for at least 15 seconds, right? 30 seconds? Indefinitely?
Now place a pan of cold water on the stovetop and stick your hand in it. Turn the burner to medium-high heat and let the water start to heat up.
Stir it around with your hand as it heats, but be careful not to touch the bottom of the pan (the bottom of the pan will heat much faster than the water). Keep your hand in there until it becomes too hot to withstand, remove your hand, and take the temperature.
Results
Most people can hold their hand in a 200°F oven for at least 30 seconds or so before it becomes uncomfortably hot. But let it go much above 135°F, and a pan of water is painful to touch. Water at 180°F is hot enough to scald you, and 212°F (boiling) water will blister and scar you if you submerge your hand in it. Why is this?
Water is much denser than air—there are many times more molecules in a cup of water than there
are in a cup of air. So, despite the fact that the water is at a lower temperature than the air in the oven, the hot water contains far more energy than the hot air and consequently heats up your hand much more rapidly. In fact, boiling water has more energy than the air in an oven at a normal roasting temperature, say 350° to 400°F. In practice, this means that boiled foods cook faster than foods that are baked or roasted. Similarly, foods baked in a moist environment cook faster than those in a dry environment, since moist air is denser than dry air.
{ Essential kitchen gear }
T
here’s a lot of nonsense to wade through out there when trying to stock your kitchen. Do you really need that$300 knife? How often are you gonna pull out that salad spinner? And exactly which one of those things they sell on TV is really going to take the place of every other piece of equipment in my kitchen? (Hint: none of them.) The problem with most of the people telling you to buy things is that they’re usually the ones selling it. Who can you trust?
Well, this chapter is a no-nonsense, no bullshit guide to point you toward what you really need in the kitchen and what is just noise.
Any Eddie Izzard fans in the audience? According to him,
“The National Rifle Association says that guns don’t kill people—people kill people. But I think the gun helps.”
Funny joke. But what’s it got to do with cooking?
I remember a time back when I first started working in restaurants. One of my jobs was to reduce a couple quarts of heavy cream down to a couple of pints. I’d get a big heavy pot with an aluminum base, pour the cream into it, and cook it over the lowest possible heat so that it’d reduce without even bubbling. I’d do this every morning, and it would take a couple hours, but no big deal; I had plenty of other tasks to keep me occupied—peeling potatoes, peeling salsify, peeling carrots (ah, the life of a green cook). Then one
morning, the pot I usually reduced the cream in was being used. Rather than wait for it to free up, I just grabbed one of the thinner stockpots off the shelf, poured in my cream, and heated it as usual.
What I ended up with was a pot full of greasy, broken cream, with a broken ego to match (the ego has since been repaired, but the cream was a lost cause). Tipping it out into the sink revealed a ½-inch-thick crust of brown crud on the bottom. The problem? My pot was too thin and its conductivity was too low. Rather than distributing the heat evenly over the bottom of the entire pot, the heat was concentrated in the areas directly above the flames. Those areas got overheated, causing the proteins in the cream directly above them to coagulate, stick to each other (and to the pot), and eventually burn. Without the emulsifying effect of the proteins, the fat in the cream separated out into a distinct, greasy yellow layer. Ick.
Obviously, it was the pot’s fault, right? Well, not exactly.
You often hear the expression “A bad cook blames his tools,” and it’s true: bad food is rarely bad because the pot was too thin or the blender was broken. But I think this is often misinterpreted. Nobody is saying that a good cook should be able to cook any dish regardless of the quality of their equipment. Reducing cream without a heavy, adequately conductive pot or an adequately low flame is nearly impossible, no matter how good a cook you are. Thin pots don’t burn cream—people burn cream. But I think the thin pot helps.
In reality, bad food is often bad because the cook chose to try and cook something that he didn’t have the proper
tools for. This is, of course, just a more complicated way of saying, “Don’t be stupid.” And that’s good advice for all walks of life, whether or not they involve homogenized emulsions of butterfat, water, phospholipids, and milk proteins
All of this is just a roundabout way of saying that the physical hardware you stock your kitchen with is just as important as the ingredients you choose or the techniques you use when you cook. Good equipment is the third side of the Triforce of cooking: good ingredients + good equipment + good technique = good food.