Joel McNeely

I ran into someone who is actually reading this nonsense the other day! Wow, that's weird. I thought it was just my own form of therapy as I try to avoid the things I'm supposed to be doing.

You know what? I generally favor an open-minded approach to just about everything. Not cooking. There are right and wrong ways of doing things in the kitchen and how you do things almost always effects the final outcome. I have this battle constantly with my wife, who thinks I am nuts.

I finally realized this when I read Harold McGee. Harold wrote a bible of cooking called 'On Food & Cooking'. It's all about the science of cooking. He also has a fantastic blog, which this week tests out the '5 second rule' that kids have about eating stuff off the floor. Fascinating and hilarious. Oh and, don't eat stuff off the floor. Ever. Blaaaah.

Anyway, once I started to wonder why things came out differently each time I'd make them, I started to pay attention to the science of it. How does heat transfer, at what rate and for how long? All these questions are crucial to success. For example, I got yelled at this morning because I was taking forever making my son's scrambled eggs. But, if you whisk the crap out of them (10 minutes, until your arm hurts) they get all infused with lots of good oxygen, which makes them fluffy and ethereal. And then if you cook them over a very low flame, slowly, slowly, they will get a sheen and texture that is otherworldly. Now, what is the difference between these eggs and the kind of sheet-rock spackle that you get in a buffet at the Red Lobster brunch? The world. And my son won't eat any eggs any other way now. Wait until he gets to college. Hah!

Almost everything benefits from understanding what is going on in your process. Why does homemade pasta dough have to be kneaded for so long? It changes the flour structure to bring out the gluten. Why does brining meat not make it salty? Wow, this is a crazy one – because the salt actually changes the structure of the protein of the meat, allowing it to hold moisture. Why do caramelized onions taste sweet? The slow cooking of onions brings out the natural sugar. Why should one never boil stock when it's reducing? It brings out all of the impurities, shakes them up and makes your stock cloudy rather than something so clear that you can see a dime in the bottom of the pot. An on and on.

Of course, all rules are meant to be broken. But as with writing music, it helps so much to know that you are breaking a rule and why you are breaking it.

Check out McGee.

http://news.curiouscook.com/