Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat
The first principles of cooking
Samin Nosrat combines chemistry with a cookbook writing style to describe the first principles of cooking. As the title suggests, good food can be broken down into 4 component parts: Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat. I’ve found these four features to be an incredibly useful structure to think about the incredible foods I’ve been able to eat throughout my summer in Asia.
At the end of the day, only so much learning can be done via a description. Once I’m done traveling, it’ll be time to start experimenting. I also haven’t read the “Heat” part yet, but maybe sometime soon.
Selections:
The primary role that salt plays in cooking is to amplify flavor.
Add it in the right amount, at the right time, in the right form.
Measure salts by weight rather than by volume.
Iodine.
Table salt also often contains anticaking agents to prevent clumps from forming, or dextrose, a form of sugar, to stabilize the iodine.
If you’ve only got table salt at home, go get yourself some kosher or sea salt right away.
Kosher Salt contains no additives, it tastes very pure.
Gradual, monitored evaporation that can take up to five years.
Fleur de sel—literally, “flower of salt”—is harvested from the surface of special sea salt beds in western France.
Delightful texture, so use them in ways that allow them to stand out.
Enjoy the way they crunch in your mouth.
Refined granular sea salt is produced by rapidly boiling down ocean water in a closed vacuum.
Keep two kinds of salt on hand: an inexpensive one such as bulk-bin sea salt or kosher salt for everyday cooking, and a special salt with a pleasant texture for garnishing food at the last moment.
Five tastes: saltiness, sourness, bitterness, sweetness, and umami, or savoriness.
Aroma involves our noses sensing any of thousands of various chemical compounds.
Flavor lies at the intersection of taste, aroma, and sensory elements including texture, sound, appearance, and temperature.
Salt also unlocks many aromatic compounds in foods.
Salt also reduces our perception of bitterness, with the secondary effect of emphasizing other flavors present in bitter dishes.
Salt enhances sweetness while reducing bitterness in foods that are both bitter and sweet.
Anything that heightens flavor is a seasoning.
Food shouldn’t be salty, it should be salted.
Tasting and adjusting.
Salt use must be carefully considered at every point in the cooking process.
In food, the movement of water across a cell wall from the saltier side to the less salty side is called osmosis.
Diffusion is the often slower process of salt moving from a saltier environment to a less salty one until it’s evenly distributed throughout.
Since diffusion is a slow process, seasoning in advance gives salt plenty of time to diffuse evenly throughout meat. This is how to season meat from within.
Time, not amount, is the crucial variable.
When an unseasoned protein is heated, it denatures: the coil tightens, squeezing water molecules out of the protein matrix, leaving the meat dry and tough if overcooked.
By disrupting protein structure, salt prevents the coil from densely coagulating, or clumping, when heated, so more of the water molecules remain bound.
You have a greater margin of error for overcooking.
Brine is a highly concentrated solution of salt in water.
The chicken salted in advance will fall off the bone as you begin to butcher it, while the other half, though moist, won’t begin to compare in tenderness.
Aim to season meat the day before cooking when possible.
The larger, denser, or more sinewy the piece of meat, the earlier you should salt it.
The colder the meat and surrounding environment are, the longer it will take the salt to do its work, so when time is limited, leave meat on the counter once you season it (but for no longer than two hours), rather than returning it to the fridge.
If you’ve salted some meat but realize you won’t be able to get to it for several days, freeze it until you’re ready to cook it. Tightly wrapped, it’ll keep for up to two months.
Seafood degrades when salted too early, yielding a tough, dry, or chewy result.
About fifteen minutes.
Salt requires water to dissolve, so it won’t dissolve in pure fat.
Lean meat has a slightly higher water (and protein) content—and thus, greater capacity for salt absorption—than fattier cuts of meat, so cuts with a big fat cap, such as pork loin or rib eye, will not absorb salt evenly.
Eggs absorb salt easily; salt makes eggs coagulate, or retain water to stay moist and tender.
An undigestible carbohydrate called pectin.
Salt assists in weakening pectin.
Season vegetables with large, watery cells—tomatoes, zucchini, and eggplant, for example—in advance of grilling or roasting to allow salt the time to do its work.
Osmosis will also cause some water loss, so pat the vegetables dry before cooking.
Usually 15 minutes before cooking is sufficient.
Mushrooms are about 80 percent water.
To preserve the texture of mushrooms, wait to add salt until they’ve just begun to brown in the pan.
The most common reason for tough beans and grains, then, is undercooking. The solution for most: keep simmering!
Since a long cooking time gives salt a chance to diffuse evenly throughout, the water for boiling grains such as rice, farro, or quinoa can be salted less aggressively than the water for blanching vegetables.
Salt aids in strengthening gluten, the protein that makes dough chewy and elastic.
Properly seasoned cooking water encourages food to retain its nutrients.
Because of diffusion and osmosis, if the water is more highly seasoned and more mineral rich, it will absorb some salt from the water as they cook, seasoning themselves from the inside out.
Beans also remain more vibrantly colored because the salt balance will keep magnesium in the beans’ chlorophyll molecules from leaching out.
Keep a pot boiling on the stove for too long, though, and water will evaporate.
Salt meats that are going to be cooked in water, like any meats, in advance, but season the cooking liquids for stews, braises, and poached meats conservatively.
Time, temperature, and water.
Ask yourself, “How can I season this from within?”
Heat stimulates salt diffusion. Salt will always diffuse more quickly at room temperature than in the fridge.
You should be able to fit all five fingers into your salt bowl and easily grab a palmful of salt.
My general ratios for measuring salt are simple: 1 percent salt by weight for meats, vegetables, and grains, and 2 percent salinity for water for blanching vegetables and pasta.
Lightly grasping the salt in your upturned palm, letting it shower down with a wag of the wrist. This grasp—not the hovering pinch I was used to—was the way to distribute salt, flour, or anything else granular, evenly and efficiently over a large surface.
Salt is a mineral and an essential nutrient.
Pepper, on the other hand, is a spice.
It doesn’t make any more sense to automatically season everything with pepper than it would to add cumin or za’atar to every dish you cook.
Tellicherry peppercorns, which ripen on the vine longer than other varieties, and therefore develop more flavor.
Spices, like coffee, always taste better when ground just before use. Flavor is locked within them in the form of aromatic oils, which are released upon grinding, and again upon heating.
Purchase whole spices whenever you can.
Just as you’d never leave flour, butter, eggs, or cream unseasoned in a savory dish, so should you never leave them unseasoned in a dessert.
Refrain from adding salt crystals until you’re sure that you’ve added the right amount of everything else.
Take a moment to think about where that salt should come from.
Sometimes, food that seems salty isn’t actually oversalted; it just needs to be balanced with some acid or fat.
Foods cooked in liquid, such as beans or braises, can often be salvaged if the salty cooking liquid is discarded.
Adopt the mantra Stir, taste, adjust. Make salt the first thing you notice as you taste and the last thing you adjust before serving a dish.
When? How much? In what form?
Some of the best versions were made with rancid olive oil.
Food can only ever be as delicious as the fat with which it’s cooked.
Where olive oil comes from has a huge effect on how it tastes—oil from hot, dry hilly areas is spicy, while oil from coastal climates with milder weather is correspondingly milder in flavor.
Fat is also one of the four elemental building blocks of all foods, along with water, protein, and carbohydrates.
Fat plays three distinct roles in the kitchen: as a main ingredient, as a cooking medium, and, like salt, as seasoning.
As a main ingredient, fat is a source both of rich flavor and of a particular desired texture.
The amount of cream and egg yolks in an ice cream determine just how smooth and decadent it’ll be (hint: the more cream and eggs, the creamier the result).
As a cooking medium, cooking fats can be heated to extreme temperatures, allowing the surface temperature of foods cooked in them to climb to astonishing heights as well.
Any fat you heat to cook food can be described as a medium.
As a seasoning, fat adjusts flavor or enriches the texture of a dish just before serving.
Will this fat bind various ingredients together? If so, this is a main ingredient. Does this fat play a textural role? For flaky, creamy, and light textures, fat plays the role of main ingredient, while for crisp textures, it’s a cooking medium. For tender textures, fat can play either role. Will this fat be heated and used to cook the food? If so, this is a cooking medium. Does this fat play a flavor role? If it’s added at the outset, it’s a main ingredient. If it’s used to adjust flavor or texture at the end of cooking the dish as a garnish, it’s a seasoning.
Boiling point of water (212°F at sea level).
The facilitation of surface browning, which typically does not begin at temperatures below 230°F.
Browning will introduce entirely new flavors, including nuttiness, sweetness, meatiness, earthiness, and savoriness (umami).
Color has little to do with the quality of olive oil, and it offers no clues to whether an olive oil is rancid. Instead,
use your nose and palate: does the olive oil smell like a box of crayons, candle wax, or the oil floating on top of an old jar of peanut butter?
Olive oil will go rancid about twelve to fourteen months after it’s been pressed, so don’t save it for a special occasion, thinking it will improve over time like a fine wine!
Use everyday olive oils for general cookery and finishing olive oils for applications where you really want to let the flavor of the olive oil stand out: in salad dressings, spooned over fish tartare, in herb salsas, or in olive oil cakes. Purchase and use flavored olive oils with caution.
An exception: olive oils marked agrumato are made using a traditional technique of milling whole citrus fruit with the olives at the time of the first press.
The Kirkland Signature Organic Extra Virgin Oil from Costco, which regularly scores well on independently administered quality analyses.
Store it somewhere reliably cool and dark.
Store olive oil in a dark glass bottle or metal can to keep light out.
Salted and unsalted, and cultured butters are best as is.
Use unsalted butter when cooking and baking, and add your own salt to taste.
Unlike oil, butter is not pure fat—it also contains water, milk protein, and whey solids, which provide much of its flavor.
Gently heat unsalted butter until those solids brown and you get brown butter, which is nutty and sweet.
Melt unsalted butter gently over sustained low heat to clarify it. The whey proteins will rise to the top of the clear, yellow fat, and other milk proteins will fall to the bottom. The water will evaporate, leaving behind 100 percent fat.
Carefully strain the rest of the butter through cheesecloth to yield clarified butter, which is an excellent medium for high-heat cooking.
With the solids removed, the butter doesn’t burn.
Indian ghee is simply clarified butter that’s been cooked at a higher temperature, allowing the milk solids to brown and lend the finished fat a sweeter flavor.
Almost every culture relies on a neutral-tasting seed or nut oil, because cooks don’t always want fat to flavor a dish. Peanut oil, expeller-pressed canola oil, and grapeseed oil are all good choices as cooking fats precisely because they don’t taste like anything. Since they have high smoke points, these oils can also withstand the high temperatures required to crisp and brown foods.
Coconut oil is also the rare vegetable oil that’s solid at room temperature.
(Cook’s tip: Both skin and hair readily absorb coconut oil, so it makes for a fantastic luxury treatment whenever you’re feeling dry!)
Most aromatic molecules are repelled by water, so in meat they’re predominantly found in an animal’s fat. As a result, any animal’s fat will taste much more distinctly of that animal than its lean meat—beef fat tastes beefier than steak.
Beef, when solid, is called suet. Liquid, it’s called tallow.
Pork, when solid, is called pork fat. Liquid, it’s called lard.
Barding is the term for covering lean meat with slices of pork belly—either smoked and called bacon, cured and called pancetta, or left unadulterated—to protect it from the dry heat of roasting.
Larding refers to the act of threading pieces of fat through a lean piece of meat with a long, thick needle.
Some fat ends up within a muscle. This is the more prized kind of fat—what we call marbling when we look at a steak. As a well-marbled steak cooks, the fat will melt, making the meat juicier from within.
That’s why, for example, chicken thighs taste more chickeny than the leaner breast meat.
Though lumps of fat might not be so tasty on the plate, you can remove them from the meat and melt them down, then use the rendered fat as a cooking medium.
Which fats we use primarily affect flavor, but how we use them will determine texture.
For food to become crisp, the water trapped in its cells must evaporate. Water evaporates as it boils, so the surface temperature of the ingredient must climb beyond the boiling point of 212°F. To achieve this effect on the entire surface of the food, it needs to be in direct, even contact with a heat source, such as a pan at temperatures well beyond water’s boiling point.
In order to get even contact between the food and the pan, we need a medium: fat.
Say a recipe asks you to cook two diced onions in two tablespoons of olive oil. In a small pan that might be enough to coat the bottom but in a larger pan with greater surface area it probably isn’t.
Make sure that the bottom of the pan is coated with fat when sautéing, or that oil comes halfway up the sides of the food when shallow-frying.
Heating Oil Properly: Preheat the pan to reduce the amount of time fat spends in direct contact with the hot metal, minimizing opportunity for it to deteriorate.
Exceptions to the preheating rule exist: butter and garlic. Both will burn if the pan is too hot, so you must heat them gently.
Test the pan with a drop of water. If it crackles a little bit before evaporating—it doesn’t have to be a violent sound—then the pan is ready.
The sound of a delicate sizzle upon addition of the food.
Intermuscular and subcutaneous fats—the lumpy bits between the muscles and the layer of fat just beneath the skin—can be cut into small pieces, placed in a pan with a minimal amount of water, rendered, or cooked over gentle heat until all the water has evaporated.
This transforms solid fat into a liquid that can be used as a cooking medium.
Strain it into a glass jar and store it in the fridge. It’ll keep for up to six months.
The smoke point of a fat is the temperature at which it decomposes and transforms into a visible, noxious gas.
Pure, refined vegetable oils such as grapeseed, canola, and peanut begin to smoke around 400°F, making them an ideal choice for high-heat applications such as deep- or stir-frying.
Impure fats don’t do as well at extreme heats; the sediment in unfiltered olive oil and the milk solids in butter will begin to reach their smoke point, or burn, at about 350°F, making them well suited for applications where a very high temperature isn’t needed and their flavors can shine, such as oil-poaching, simple vegetable sautés, pan-frying fish or meat.
Achieving Crispness: Preheat the pan, then preheat the fat. Avoid putting more than a single layer of food into the pan, which will cause the temperature to drop drastically and steam to condense and make food soggy.
Cooking in fat that’s insufficiently hot will cause food to absorb the oil.
If the fat is too hot, the outer surface of the food will brown and become crisp before the center has a chance to cook through.
The goal with all cooking is to achieve your desired result on the outside and inside of an ingredient at the same time.
Allow hot, crisp foods to cool off in a single layer.
Pop it into a hot oven for a few minutes to reheat it before serving.
An emulsion happens when two liquids that normally don’t like to mix together or dissolve give up and join together.
An emulsion is a temporary peace treaty between fat and water.
When an emulsion breaks, the fat and water molecules begin to coalesce back into their own troops.
An emulsifier is like a third link in the chain, a mediator attracting and uniting two formerly hostile parties.
Mayonnaise is an oil-in-water emulsion made by slowly whisking tiny droplets of oil into an egg yolk, which itself is a natural emulsion of fat and water.
Yolk contains lecithin, an emulsifier with one end that likes fat and another that likes water.
With vigorous whisking, lecithin connects the minuscule amount of water innate to a yolk to the oil droplets and surrounds tiny air bubbles.
Butter as “coagulated sunlight” is the only animal fat made without killing an animal.
Butter retains its solid form from freezing temperatures (32°F) until it melts (90°F).
Butter sauce: Temperature is crucial with butter-water emulsions. The key is to start with a warm pan and cold butter. For a simple pan sauce, after removing a steak, fish filet, or pork chop from the pan, tip out any excess fat. Place the pan back over the heat and add just enough liquid—water, stock, or wine—to coat the bottom. Using a wooden spoon, scrape any delicious crusty bits into the sauce and bring it to a boil. Then, for each serving, add 2 tablespoons of very cold butter into the pan and swirl over medium-high heat, letting the butter melt into the liquid. Don’t let the pan get so hot that the butter sizzles; as long as there is enough water in the sauce, you’ll be fine. Once you see the sauce begin to thicken, turn off the flame and let the butter finish melting over residual heat, but don’t stop swirling. Taste for salt and, if needed, add a squeeze of lemon or splash of wine. Spoon over the food and serve immediately.
Some emulsions will naturally break with time, and others will break if fat and water are combined too quickly, but the most common way to ruin one is to allow its temperature to swing.
First, as soon as you suspect that you are on shaky ground, stop adding fat. If the emulsion isn’t thickening and the tines of the whisk aren’t leaving visible tracks, then for heaven’s sake stop adding oil! Sometimes, all that’s called for at this point is a good strong whisking to bring things back together.
Two proteins in wheat—glutenin and gliadin—comprise gluten.
When you combine wheat flour and liquid
to make dough or batter, these proteins link up with one another into long chains. As dough is kneaded or batter is mixed, the chains develop into strong, extensive webs or the gluten network. The expansion of these webs is called gluten development, and it’s what makes a dough chewy and elastic.
Shortening: The gluten strands remain short instead of lengthening.
Four main variables will determine the texture of any baked good: fat, water, yeast, and how much the dough or batter is kneaded or worked.
Short doughs are the epitome of tenderness, crumbling and melting in your mouth.
These recipes call for very soft or even melted butter, in order to encourage this now fluid fat to quickly coat individual flour particles, preventing gluten webs from forming.
Flaky doughs break apart into flakes when you take a bite.
They create crusts sturdy enough to hold up to a mile-high pile of apples or juicy summer fruits, but delicate enough to produce thin, uneven flakes when sliced.
The fat must be very cold so that some of it can remain in distinct pieces.
When you slide the pie into a hot oven, the cold pieces of butter, entrapped air, and steam from the water released by the butter, all push apart the layers of dough to create flakes.
The flakiest pastries are made with laminated doughs.
In laminated doughs, a flaky dough is wrapped around a large slab of butter. This dough-and-butter sandwich is rolled out and then folded back upon itself in a process called a turn.
Pastry chefs’ compulsion to keep everything cold: they work on cool marble countertops and freeze their mixer bowls and metal tools.
The remarkable capacity to entrap air when whipped allows fat to act as a leavening, or raising, agent in cakes and transform liquid cream into billowy clouds.
Layering fats.
The best way to correct overly fatty food is to rebalance the dish.
Add more food to increase total volume, add more acid, water it down, or add starchy or dense ingredients. If possible, chill the dish, let the fat come to the surface and solidify, then skim it off. Alternately, lift food out of a very greasy pan and dab it on a clean towel, leaving the fat behind.
The reason why everyone spoons so much cranberry sauce over everything at Thanksgiving is that on most tables, it’s just about the only form of acid available.
The true value of acid is not its pucker, but rather, balance.
Acid grants the palate relief, and makes food more appealing by offering contrast.
Acid is salt’s alter ego. While salt enhances flavors, acid balances them.
Any substance that registers below 7 on the pH scale is an acid.
A much handier acid sensor—a tongue. Anything that tastes sour is a source of acid.
Lemon juice, vinegar, or wine.
Anything fermented, from cheese and sourdough bread to coffee and chocolate, will lend a pleasant tang to your food, as will most fruits.
The tomato.
Acid makes our mouths water the most. When we eat anything sour, our mouths flood with saliva to balance out the acidity, as it’s dangerous for our teeth.
While the salt threshold is absolute, acid balance is relative.
Even the same cheese, aged for different lengths of time, will taste more acidic and complex in flavor, which is why we call a young cheddar mild and an aged one sharp.
Not only the location of a tree but the location of an orange on a tree will affect flavor.
Vinegars.
Citrus.
Lemon.
Lime.
Never use, though, is bottled citrus juice.
Pickles.
Cultured dairy products.
Acid dulls vibrant greens, so wait until the last possible moment to dress salads.
On the other hand, acid keeps reds and purples vivid.
Raw fruits and vegetables that are susceptible to oxidation will retain their natural color if coated with a little acid or kept in water mixed with a few drops of lemon juice or vinegar until they are ready to cook or eat.
Anything containing cellulose or pectin, including legumes, fruits, and vegetables, will cook much more slowly in the presence of acid.
While ten to fifteen minutes of simmering in water is enough to soften carrots into baby food, they’ll still be somewhat firm after an hour of stewing in red wine.
The acid in tomatoes explains why those pesky onions float to the top of a pot of sauce or soup and stay there, never getting soft, even after hours of cooking. To prevent this crunchy mishap, cook onions until they’re tender before adding any tomatoes, wine, or vinegar to the pot.
When cooking beans or any legumes, including the chickpeas for hummus, a pinch of baking soda will gently nudge the bean water away from acidity toward alkalinity, ensuring tenderness. And, just like those onions, cook legumes until they are completely tender before adding anything acidic.
Boiling dilutes the relatively acidic liquid contained in vegetable cells, so it will generally yield more tender vegetables than roasting will.
Acid also encourages bonds between pectin groups—the gelling agent in fruit—so that they can trap water to help set jam or jelly.
Acid is required when using chemical leavenings such as baking soda or baking powder. Visualize the baking soda and vinegar volcanoes of your elementary school science projects. Just like that, but on a much smaller scale, acid reacts with baking soda to release carbon dioxide bubbles to leaven baked goods.
Under normal conditions, strands of egg proteins unravel and tighten when heated. As they do, the strands squeeze out water, causing eggs to toughen and dry out. Acid draws egg proteins together before they can unravel, which inhibits them from joining too closely. A few secret drops of lemon juice will produce creamier, more tender scrambled eggs. For perfect poached eggs, add a capful of vinegar into boiling water to help speed up coagulation of the white and strengthen the outer texture, while preserving the runny yolk.
Acid aids in stabilizing whipped egg whites by encouraging more, finer air pockets, helping to increase the volume of the egg white foam.
Dairy proteins called casein will coagulate, or curdle, with the addition of acid.
With the exception of butter and heavy cream, which are very low in protein, dairy should only be added to acidic dishes at the last minute.
When acid comes into contact with the coils, they unfold and unwind. This process is called denaturation.
These denatured proteins then begin to bump into each other and coagulate, reconnecting into an intimate network.
If food continues to sit in acid—the protein network will continue to tighten, squeezing water out of the protein altogether, resulting in tough, dry food, much like an overcooked steak.
Acid also helps break down collagen, the main structural protein found in tough cuts of meat.
Two easy ways to produce acid in food as we cook.
The fast method? Browning foods.
The chemical reaction involved in browning sugars is called caramelization.
The chemical reaction involved in browning meats, seafood, vegetables, baked goods, or just about anything else is called the Maillard reaction.
As it caramelizes, a single sugar molecule will develop into hundreds of new and different compounds, including some acids.
Caramel is acidic!
The other, much slower, method for producing acid in the kitchen is fermentation, where, in addition to many other flavor-producing processes, carbohydrates transform into carbon dioxide and acids or alcohols using yeasts, bacteria, or a combination thereof.
According to Chad Robertson, of Tartine Bakery in San Francisco, who lets his dough rise for more than thirty hours, slow fermentation “improves the flavor, in large part because more sugars are available to caramelize during the baking. The loaves brown faster and the crust gets darker.”
A single dish can often benefit from several forms of acid: think of this as layering acids as you cook.
Some acids should be worked into dishes from the start.
Cooking acids include tomatoes, white wine, beer, and mirin.
They can be extraordinarily subtle; while their presence may go undetected, their absence is sharply felt.
Macerate, from Latin, “to soften,” refers to the process whereby ingredients soak in some form of acid—usually vinegar or citrus juice—to soften their harshness.
Garnishing acids are used to finish a dish.
When you can, use the same kind of acid for cooking and garnishing.
This kind of layering offers multiple tastes of the same ingredient.
And then there are times when a single form of acid isn’t enough to accomplish its task. Feta cheese, tomato, olives, and red wine vinegar offer four distinct forms of acid in a Greek salad.
Sauce, and in fact most condiments, are sources of both acid and salt, they offer a pretty surefire way to improve flavor.
Umami is, in fact, the result of flavor compounds called glutamates.
MSG.
Two foods most abundant in naturally occurring glutamates are Parmesan and tomato ketchup.
All five of our basic tastes are activated with a single bite.
Salted Caramel Sauce has never gone out of fashion. And it never will.
Roasted carrots, cauliflower, and broccoli—or anything that’s developed sweetness from browning—will always appreciate a squeeze of lemon or touch of vinegar.
A salad should relieve your palate and leave it clean after rich, muddy foods.
Stand up to the other intense flavors.
Though each dish, on its own, should always be balanced in Salt, Fat, and Acid, there is also the larger picture to consider—a good meal should also be balanced.
Since the human body can’t produce certain essential forms of salt, fat, and acid, our palates have evolved to seek these three elements.
Play to each element’s strengths: use Salt to enhance, Fat to carry, and Acid to balance flavor. Now, with the knowledge of how they affect various foods, add each to a dish at the right time in order to season it from within. Add salt
early to a pot of beans, but acid late. Season meat for a braise in advance, then start it off on the heat with a dose of cooking acid. When it’s done and rich in flavor, lighten it with a garnishing acid.
Write a letter to your favorite restaurant professing your love and beg for an apprenticeship. Skip culinary school; spend a fraction of the cost of tuition traveling the world instead.
The best cooks looked at the food, not the heat source.
Heat’s sensory cues, including sizzles, spatters, crackles, steam, bubbles, aromas, and browning, are often more important than a thermometer.
Apply heat at the right level, and at the right rate, so that the surface of a food and its interior are done cooking at the same time.
Know what you’re after.
Think about your goals in the kitchen in terms of flavors and textures.
For example, if you want to end up with a bowl of flavorful, snowy white mashed potatoes, then think about the last step: mashing potatoes with butter and sour cream, and tasting and adjusting for salt. To get there, you’ll need to simmer the potatoes in salted water until they’re tender. To get there, you’ll need to peel and cut the potatoes. There’s your recipe.
For something more complicated—say, crispy pan-fried potatoes—you’ll want to end with a golden-brown crust and a tender interior. So the last step will be frying in hot fat to achieve crispness. To get there, make sure the potatoes are tender inside—simmer them in salted water. To get there, peel and cut them. There’s another recipe.
As food is heated, the molecules within it begin to speed up, colliding with each other as they go.
And the chemical reactions initiated by heat affect the flavor and texture of food.