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

by Jeff Potter

  Giving: Friendly, well-liked, and enthusiastic, giving cooks seldom experiment, they love baking, and like to serve tried-and-true family favorites, although that sometimes means serving less healthful foods.

  Healthy: Optimistic, book-loving, nature enthusiasts, healthy cooks experiment with fish, fresh produce, and herbs. Health comes first, even if it means sometimes sacrificing taste.

  Methodical: Talented cooks who rely heavily on recipes. The methodical cook has refined tastes and manners. Their creations always look exactly like the picture in the cookbook.

  Innovative: Creative and trend-setting, innovative cooks seldom use recipes and like to experiment with ingredients, cuisine styles, and cooking methods.

  Competitive: The "Iron Chef" of the neighborhood, competitive cooks have dominant personalities and are intense perfectionists who love to impress their guests.

  Used by permission of Brian Wansink, author of Mindless Eating

  Avoid PEBKAC-type errors: RTFR!

  Avoid Problem Exists Between Knife And Chair–type errors by Reading The F’ing Recipe! Recipes are code, although they require some interpretation, so read the recipe, top to bottom, before starting. One interviewee, Lydia Walshin, explains:

  The biggest, biggest piece of advice that I can give any cook starting out, and even a lot of experienced cooks, is to take a minute, breathe deeply, read the recipe first, and know from the beginning where you think you want to end up. Don’t start out thinking you’re making a soup and halfway through you find out you’re making a stew, because it’s a recipe for disaster.

  Every. Word. Matters. I’ve watched geeks with PhDs in chemistry skip right over steps that say "turn off heat" in the middle of a recipe that involves melting chocolate in simmering port. Turn off heat? But melting things requires heat! In fact, the residual heat from the port will melt the chocolate, and this way you don’t accidentally burn it.

  It’s okay to go "off recipe." In fact, it’s a great way to learn; just do it intentionally. Maybe you don’t have all the ingredients and want to substitute something else. Perhaps the recipe is poorly written or has errors. Or, as in programming, you can see there’s more than one way to do it and you want to do it differently. A recipe isn’t a strict protocol, but do understand the suggested protocol before deviating.

  There’s a lot of room for personal preference in cooking. Just because a recipe for hot chocolate might say "½ cup heavy cream, 1 cup milk," that doesn’t mean you must use those quantities. As another interviewee put it, "Please, let’s get off the recipes!" I couldn’t agree more. If you’re following a recipe and think it needs more or less of something, or could benefit from an extra spice, go for it. I usually stick to the recipe the first time I make something, but after that, all bets are off. I’ll pull out a pencil, make notes, change quantities, drop and add ingredients. I encourage you to do that to this book! After making something, take a pencil and make notes as to what you’d do differently next time. That way, when you next pick up the book, you’ll remember how to tweak the recipe to your taste. (And if there are any errors in the text, you won’t repeat them.)

  If a brownie recipe calls for walnuts, but you really like almonds, yes, it’ll still work! Out of vanilla extract? Those chocolate chip cookies will be fine. Your timer says the chicken has been in for the prescribed time, but it’s still got that gross, raw chicken look? Pop it back in the oven. (Better yet, use a probe thermometer, as explained in Thermometers and timers in Chapter 2.)

  In most modern cookbooks, recipes are laid out in two sections: ingredients and methods. The ingredients section lists the quantities and prep steps for each of the ingredients, and the methods section describes how to combine them. Recipes in this book are laid out in a more conversational format that walks you through the recipes with ingredients listed as they come up. Pay attention to the notes, as they show where you can do things differently.

  To get started, consider the recipe for hot chocolate on the following page.

  The recipes in this book give both weight in grams and standard U.S. volume-based quantities. Sometimes, the weights are rounded up or down a bit. 1 cup milk, for example, actually weighs 256 grams (1 cup = 237 ml). We’ll cover when to use weight and when to use volume in Chapter 2, but be aware that the conversions given between the two are sometimes rounded for convenience’s sake.

  What kind of milk? Whole milk? Skim? If a recipe doesn’t specify, it shouldn’t matter too much, although as a general rule I tend to split the difference and grab lowfat/semi-skimmed milk. Sometimes the choice is governed by taste preference, so if you’re used to that watery stuff or are the stick-of-butter type, go for it. Some cookbooks will specify defaults in their introductions, perhaps defining milk as whole milk. The most common generic term is flour. When it’s called for, you can assume that what you need is AP (all-purpose) flour. AP flour really isn’t all-purpose; it just has a moderate amount of gluten (10–12%) as compared to cake flour (6–8%) or bread flour (12–14%).

  When a recipe calls for something "to taste," add a pinch, taste it, and continue adding until you think it is balanced. What constitutes balanced is a matter of cultural background and personal preference for some ingredients, especially seasoning ingredients such as salt, lemon juice, vinegar, and hot sauce. There’s some evidence that some of these preferences are actually a matter of biological differences between the way different people taste, as discussed in Chapter 3.

  Hot Chocolate

  In a saucepan, gently heat over low heat until hot, but do not boil:

  1 cup (250g) milk

  ½ cup (125g) heavy cream

  Once the milk and cream are hot, turn off heat, add, and whisk until completely melted:

  3 tablespoons (40g) chopped bittersweet chocolate

  Salt to taste. (Why add salt? See Salty in Chapter 3.)

  Notes

  Try adding a few pinches of cinnamon or cayenne pepper. For a smoky version, use powdered chipotle peppers. For a lighter version, use just milk.

  Be careful not to burn the chocolate! Adding chocolate to hot liquid with the heat off will prevent this.

  Oaxacan Drinking Chocolate

  Heat until hot (stovetop or microwave) in a bowl that you can whisk in:

  ½ cup (125g) whole milk

  ½ cup (125g) water

  Once hot, remove from heat and add 2 to 3 small squares, about 20 to 30 grams, of Oaxacan chocolate ("Mexican chocolate"). Thoroughly whisk to melt the chocolate and combine.

  If your mug is wide enough, you can use a whisk directly in the mug, rolling it back and forth between your palms.

  Notes

  The Oaxacan (roughly "o-a-hawk-an")—who live in a region of Mexico known for chocolate production—use a chocolate that has skipped the conching process, which Europeans use to create a smoother chocolate. Oaxacan chocolate has sugar and sometimes cinnamon added into it as well.

  Pre-Columbian Oaxacan would have used only water rather than including milk. Try making this variation and compare. For a modern dairy-free version, replace both the milk and water with hazelnut milk, which makes for a fantastically light taste.

  f(g(x)) != g(f(x)) Translation? Order of operations is important! "3 tablespoons bittersweet chocolate, chopped" is not the same thing as "3 tablespoons chopped bittersweet chocolate." The former calls for 3 tablespoons of chocolate that are then chopped up (taking up more than 3 tablespoons), whereas the latter refers to a measure of chocolate that has already been chopped. When you see recipes calling for "1 cup nuts, chopped," measure the nuts, then chop; likewise, if the recipe calls for "1 cup chopped nuts," chop the nuts and then measure out 1 cup.

  Taste == Feedback

  Learn to really taste things. The mechanical aspects of cooking—combining ingredients, applying heat—come down to smell and taste. Pay attention to your sense of smell and see if you can notice a change in the odors just as the food finishes cooking. Take time to taste a dish and ask yourself what would make it bett
er. And taste things throughout the process of cooking to see how the flavors evolve over time.

  One of the first things I was taught in painting class was to be comfortable scraping the still-wet oil paint off the canvas. We were told to paint a still life; a few hours later, our instructor said, "Great, now take the palette knife and scrape the paint off. All of it." Talk about frustration! But it’s a good lesson: becoming attached to the current state of something prevents you from being able to see better ways of doing it. In writing, it’s called "killing your babies": deleting favorite bits of the text that no longer serve their original purpose. (These are usually pieces of text that are older and have survived rewrites due to emotional attachment.) "Killing your babies" is about getting beyond the current version, about getting from point A to a better point: B.

  How does all this relate to cooking? Given a sauce, stew, cookie dough, whatever food you’re working with, its "current state" is A. If you taste it and think it’s not quite right, how do you get to B? Start with A, taste it, take a guess at what might make it better, and try version B. Turning out great food isn’t about following a recipe exactly and getting it right on the first pass; it’s about making many small guesses and picking the better choice with each guess.

  Try making a guess with a small side portion if you’re unsure. Making stew? Put a few spoonfuls in a bowl and season that. Making cookies? Bake just one cookie, see how it comes out, and tweak the dough before making the next one.

  How Many Milliliters in a Cup?

  It depends. In a standard U.S. cup, 237 ml. But if you’re talking about a U.S. "legal" cup, as used on nutrition labels, it’s 240 ml. Live in Canada, eh? That’ll be 250 ml, please. Or are we British? An imperial cup is 284 ml. This leaves me wondering: is a pint of Guinness actually larger in Ireland?

  Randall Munroe of xkcd (http://www.xkcd.com) has kindly provided the following guide to converting to metric.

  USED BY PERMISSION OF RANDALL MUNROE, XKCD.COM

  P.S. Which weighs more: an ounce of gold or an ounce of feathers? (Hint: 31 grams in a troy ounce; 28 grams in a normal ounce.)

  Sure, to be proficient at something you do need the technical skill to be able to see where you want to go and to understand how to get there. And happy accidents do happen. However, the methodical approach is to look at A, wonder if maybe B would be better, and rework it until you have B. ("Hmm, seems a bit dull, needs a bit more zing, how about some lemon juice?") The real skill isn’t in getting to B, though: it’s in holding the memory of A in your head and judging whether B is actually an improvement. It’s an iterative process—taste, adjust, taste, adjust—with each loop either improving the dish or educating you about what guesses didn’t work out. Even the bad guesses are useful because they’ll help you build up a body of knowledge.

  Taste the dish. It’s your feedback mechanism both for checking if A is "good enough" and for determining if B is better than A.

  Don’t be afraid to burn dinner!

  Talking with other geeks, I realized how lucky I was as a kid to have parents who both liked to cook and made time to sit down with us every day over a good home-cooked meal. Because of this background, approaching the kitchen has never been a big deal for me. But for some, the simple idea of stepping into the kitchen sets off panic attacks as the primitive parts of the brain take over (you can blame your brain’s locus coeruleus; it’s not your fault).

  Here’s the thing. Failure in the kitchen—burning something, "wasting" money, and having to order pizza—is actually success. Think of it this way: there’s not much to learn when things work. When they fail, you have a chance to understand where the boundary conditions are and an opportunity to learn how to save something in the future when things go awry. Made mac ’n cheese from scratch but the sauce turned out gritty? Spend some time searching online and you’ll discover that gritty cheese sauce = "broken" sauce, which is caused by too much heat and stirring, or using nonfat cheese. The key to learning how to cook is to define success as a chance to learn rather than as a perfect meal. Even if dinner does end up in the trash, if you learned something about what went wrong, that’s success. Failure in the kitchen is a better instructor than success.

  Fear of failure is another thoroughly modern American phenomenon. We’re bombarded with images of the perfect Thanksgiving turkey (they probably used a plastic one during the photo shoot), photos of models sporting impossible physiques (thanks, Photoshop), and stories of triumph and success (where they don’t disclose the sad parts and trade-offs). Then when we go to try something, we often find it doesn’t work for us the way it seems to for others. Setbacks. Negative feedback. No wonder there’s so much fear of failure: we’ve set ourselves a bar so high that it simply doesn’t exist.

  There’s a generation of Americans hung up on being perfect. The perfect white teeth, the perfect clothing, the perfect "carefree" tossed-together wardrobe. Helicopter parents. Overly critical Yelp.com reviews that rag on everything, down to who cuts our hair and the food we eat. Insane expectations in reviews on Amazon.com about the books we read. (A good book is one that gives you more value than the cost of the book and your time. Be kind. ;-) ) No wonder why some parts of American society seem to match the DSM-V criteria for schizophrenia: we’re literally going insane trying to be perfect when it just isn’t possible. It’s much easier to love yourself for who you are than to try to be perfect (the latter will never bring true happiness), and it’s much easier in the kitchen to aspire to "fun and tasty" than the perfect 16-course gourmet meal (although attempting it can be fun on occasion).

  Be okay with being "just" good enough. Part of the appeal of Julia Child was her almost-average abilities and her "nothing special" aura. The reason some people fear Martha Stewart is because her cooking looks perfect and always comes out perfectly on the first try. (I have the world of respect for Ms. Stewart.) Given her background—starting a catering business out of her basement—she had to be perfect to succeed. (Wedding days have to be perfect, no?) This quest for perfection comes at a real cost, though; even if it’s achievable for a day, it isn’t practical day-in, day-out.

  Set reasonable goals, and expect to get frustrated on occasion. Cooking well takes practice. Play around with various ingredients and techniques, and come up with projects you want to try. (Mmm, bacon and egg breakfast pizza.) It’s like learning to play the guitar: at first you strive just to hit the notes and play the chords, and it takes time to gain command of the basic techniques and to move on to the level where subtle improvisation and nuanced expression can occur. If your dream is to play in a band, don’t expect to get up on stage after a day or even a month; start by picking up a basic book on learning to play the guitar and practicing somewhere you’re comfortable.

  A beta tester for this book commented:

  While there are chefs with natural-born abilities, people have to be aware that learning to cook is an iterative process. They have to learn to expect not to get it right the first time, and proceed from there, doing it again and again.

  What about when you fubar (foobar?) a meal and can’t figure out why? Think of it like not solving a puzzle on the first try. When starting to cook, make sure you don’t pick puzzles that are too difficult. Start with simpler puzzles (recipes) that will allow you to gain the insights needed to solve the harder ones. And give it time. You might have days when you feel like you’ve learned nothing, but the cumulative result will lead to insights.

  If a recipe doesn’t work as well as you’d have liked, try to figure out why and then try it again. It might also be the fault of the recipe, or that the recipe is simply too advanced. I know some newbies who have gotten stuck trying to perfect one dish. They usually burn out in frustration. If you’re not happy with the results of your early attempts, try a different source of recipes. Some books, especially those from top-tier restaurateurs such as Chefs Thomas Keller or Grant Achatz, are highly technical and complicated. Don’t begin with these recipes; instead, pick recipes that li
mit the number of variables to just a handful that you can manage.

  "A Kinder, Gentler Philosophy of Success"

  Celebrity Chef Gordon Ramsay has carved out a niche as a raging culinary maniac. (Secretly, I bet he’s "tough but gentle on the inside," and that the TV series Hell’s Kitchen has edited the footage to exaggerate his hot temper.) Getting results doesn’t have to be about fear and intimidation, though. There’s a great TED talk (TED is an annual conference loosely related to "Technology Education Design") by Alain de Botton available online, called "A kinder, gentler philosophy of success"; see http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/alain_de_botton_a_kinder_gentler_philosophy_of_success.html.

  Picking a Recipe

  I hope by now I’ve convinced you that it’s okay to burn the meal, to read the entire recipe before starting, and that xkcd is awesome. (Maybe you already knew all these things...) You’re ready to venture into the kitchen and want to make your favorite dish. Where to start?

  If you’re new to cooking, do what experienced programmers do when encountering a new language: look at a few different examples. Don’t just print out and follow the first recipe you find; that’d be like downloading a random executable and running it. Recipes should be treated as reference implementations, especially if you’re cooking a dish that you’ve never made before. Pull up a couple of examples, consider what the authors were doing, and ask yourself what makes their "code" (recipe) work and what parts of their "code" apply to what you want to do.