Tag: cooking

May 1, 2024 – Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking

May 1, 2024 /

Ratio by Michael Ruhlman is the Left Coast Culinary Book Club selection for May. How about that, it is the first of the month and I am already done? Well, you can guess that I have had a lot of reading time lately. It is waiting in the waiting room for doctor’s appointments or sitting by while my wife watches TV or is sleeping. Consequently I finished this month’s book and I am way ahead on Dante’s Divine Comedy.

I didn’t know it at the time, but growing up I was spoiled. My Grandmother was the best pie maker that I knew. The truth is, everybody on that side of my family made good pies. It was only when I got exposed to store made pies that I realized not all pies were equal.

One day I asked my Grandmother what the secret was and she said that my Great Grandmother was a pie maker for a diner and she said that the ratio of the crust was not only easy but also the secret. It was 1 cup flour, 1/2 cup shorting and 1/4 cup water. That turns out to be 4:2;1 in terms of ratios.

Not long after that, I assumed the role of process chemist. I spent a lot of my time scaling batches between the lab, the pilot reactor and full scale batches. I soon learned that it wasn’t the units of things that made a difference but the ratios of ingredients. Once I had the ratios figured out, I could convert to the exact units of measure to my hearts content.

I was excited to read this book. I intuitively knew that ratios were the secret but I had never given much thought to it other than the pie crust. After reading it, I have more mixed feelings about it. Here are some of my thoughts.

First, I would say that probably half of the book was about baking. While I don’t want to split hairs, typically baking and cooking are different disciplines. Certainly at home, it is often the cook is also baking but it set some different expectations from the title and the content. To cement matters, I am not much of a baker nor do I have a ton of interest in it. That is not to say I don’t enjoy a good desert, but I just don’t crave them much along with the clean-up that goes with it.

Of some of the items in the cooking one example was stock making. I find it a stretch that there is a proper proportion of bones to water. This is especially true when Ruhlman agrees with Samin Nosrat that if you cannot use homemade stock, you are better off using water than store purchased stock. I use what I have on hand and that is just fine with me.

Many of the final items were pretty highbrow. There were more French dishes in this book than I have ever read. Many of them I had never heard of either. The final chapter was about custards and he goes on to describe a smoked salmon custard with shrimp halves. Additionally, he talks about making crème brulee. I am not saying home cooks shouldn’t attempt this but it after you make your shrimp custard to top steak, who is making crème brulee?

Finally, I disagreed with some of the ratios. I tend to think that ratios are a starting point in cooking. If you don’t have 2:1:1 ratio of onion, carrots and celery, is it still mirepoix? I think so. Sometimes I use the half of onion that is already cut rather than a whole one. Sometimes I want to finish off the old bag of carrots or celery that is long in the tooth.

Lest you think that I am totally down on this book, I would suggest that for people that are clueless in the kitchen this is a good resource. He does freely state that ratios can be modified in most cases. But, if people do not know how to start, this is a gateway to the science of cooking. There is freedom in not being a slave to a recipe. You can’t get the freedom until you understand each ingredient’s place in the dish.

End Your Programming Routine: As a former chemist doing chemical engineering work, I see ratios in recipes. I find myself scaling for the ingredients on hand or eaters. So, maybe this book isn’t for me necessarily but it might be for you. Especially if you are struggling in the baking department or fine French food. It may change your perspective from a mystery to an art.

October 24, 2022 – The Kitchen Counter Cooking School Followup

October 24, 2022 /

I found the book warranted more than a quick review. So, I decided to do a podcast as well. There is almost nothing more important to your health than what you put into your body. If you don’t know how to cook, you are going to be at the mercy of others. I also talk about my history of cooking and go a little deeper with my journey with food.

End Your Programming Routine: We are heavily programmed with food. We have memories tied to it, we are addicted to it and we need food in our lives. What we also need is knowledge base to make educated decisions for our relationship with food. If you are stuck in the food web, pick a few things to change. It may be that one of those build confidence to change others.

October 11, 2022 – The Kitchen Counter Cooking School

October 11, 2022 /

The Kitchen Counter Cooking School: How a Few Simple Lessons Transformed Nine Culinary Novices into Fearless Home Cooks by Kathleen Flinn is the Left Coast Culinary Book Club selection for September 2022. In many ways, this is a follow up to The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry. It picks up where that book left off in Kathleen Flinn’s timeline.

I have found this book very interesting because I identify very much with Kathleen’s psyche. Here she goes to Le Cordon Bleu kind of on a whim, gets her credentials and then immediately writes a book. She is interested in food and cooking but really doesn’t want to put those skills to work traditionally. She even says it herself that she doesn’t know what she want’s to do. Sounds like someone I know.

I don’t want to spoil the book, but Kathleen has an epiphany while grocery shopping. She observes how much junk people are loading into their carts and begins asking the question of why. The most pervasive answer is that people don’t know how to cook. This book describes a social experiment, bringing in nine people that had little to no skills to see what happens. I will let you read the book to find out the methods and how it went.

This made me think about our current society. We live in a world that is surrounded by information. We take in the information as entertainment and so my analysis here is that whatever happens on the screen is not reality. Therefore, we have programmed our brains to say ‘that all happened in fantasy land, I will now operate in the real world’. What I am trying to say is that we cannot make the link between what I can do and what I see. Channels such as Food Channel, HGTV and MotorTrend can be entertaining and informative. But, I feel like their best disposition is really as inspiration.

Couple that with product marketing and misinformation. Unless people really study the information and use critical thinking, of course they are misguided. I hate to take this back to the tired old Covid analogy, but here we go. We are entering the ‘flu season’ of 2022. Pretty much what I see now is that everything is back to the way things were pre-Covid with the exception that masks are now permitted in banks, schools, etc. I just heard the commercial to get your fourth booster.

How do we rectify the crisis that was with the ambivalence of today? In my opinion, what we thought we knew in 2020 was wrong. Notice, no one is talking about why we are behaving differently today then we were two years ago. This is what brings us back to food. Even the supposed experts on health were wrong with Covid. What make us think that they are right about die?

Kathleen Flinn is not getting her due from my side trip. But, she did inspire it and she is right that the vast majority of people don’t know how to cook. Some of it is their fault and some of it is not. For instance, even I have heard numerous chefs recommend soup base as a starter. To me, that is fine for a restaurant because their number one priority is profit whereas a home cook’s number one priority is nourishment; and that ain’t in soup base.

I want to be careful, I am not denigrating anyone’s choices. I sometimes use shortcuts too. But, I know how to cook and my choices are made by circumstances like I don’t have time to defrost stock so I use soup base, not by lack of skills. It’s like I wrote about salad dressing in the past. Back when I was a child, buying salad dressing was a convenience but now it is a lost skill.

This is a book that is an easy read. To get the full impact, you have to be ready for it. It’s like watering dry ground, it is just going to run off. But, if your soil is a little bit moist, then it is going to soak that water deep to the roots.

End Your Programming Routine: This is the last scheduled book of the year. I have to say that I was really not excited about any of the selections, surprisingly I have warmed up to all of them. I am really glad that this was how we finished the year because this is the kind of stuff that I am really into. I love a good dinner, but I really enjoy changing the status quo, even if it is for nine people.

February 24, 2020 – Review: My Paris Kitchen

February 24, 2020 /

“My Paris Kitchen: Recipes and Stories” by David Lebowitz is the February 2020 book selection for the Left Coast Cellars Culinary Book Club. David is an American food blogger that has lived in Paris for the last ten years. You can check out his work in the link.

This work is a cookbook, where the stories are largely about some aspect of the recipe in focus. There were a few interesting factoids that I picked up reading the book like most apartments don’t have kitchens in Paris, service at most stores is curt to nonexistent, mustard is the French salsa and the most prevalant cheese used is Gruyere (which is Swiss).

The section that interested me the most was the appetizer section. It has the most variety of recipes and is not strictly French cooking. Influences of Africa and the Middle East are very apparent in this section, like the use of Harissa.

David does a good job of Anglicizing the recipes as there are ingredients that do not exist the majority of the United States. He talks about what is considered proper and what he would use (in some cases does use) in its place.

The photography and food stylizing make the recipes look very appetizing. This month, the host of my book club will not be available. So, we will not be focused on a specific meal but just appetizers. I think that I will make ‘Sardine Spread’ as my first foray into this cookbook.

Truthfully, I don’t see myself using this cookbook much. I think that it is largely the lack of classic French dishes and the plethora of cultural fusion in the book. My go to cookbooks are written by subject matter experts on the particular cuisine, like Rick Bayless for instance. Nevertheless, I want to try a few things before it gets filed away.

December 17, 2019 Stock or Water?

December 17, 2019 /
Making stock requires a few common ingredients

Reading ‘Salt, Fat, Acid Heat’ by Samin Nosrat a few months ago, one of her statements struck me. I am paraphrasing, but the implication is use homemade stock or water if not on hand, do not use pre-prepared or store bought stock. After listening to a few podcasts and reading the ingredients, I tend to agree as well.

The good news is, making stock is cheap and easy. The biggest hurdle is time followed by the end result storage if you don’t use it all in one setting. What I am showing in the picture is two whole chicken carcasses (mostly bones and skin), onion, garlic, celery, carrots, salt, pepper and bay leaves. I also don’t get too fussy about the proportions. I try to get two carrots and two celery stocks with half an onion, but I use what I have on hand. You can save parts on hand in the freezer until you feel like you have enough offal or bones or you need to make stock for a recipe.

For best results, try to keep it under boiling, but that is really for clarity and not flavor. My style is to let it go overnight, turn it off in the morning and stick it in the refrigerator the next evening. I also try to let it cool, skim off the fat and filter the liquid through a coarse strainer if I have the time

When complete, I put about three cups in a quart jar and put them into the freezer. If I have less than three cups, I put it into the refrigerator for current use. You can also pressure can it for shelf stable storage. That is it. In the words of Charlie Papazian, ‘Relax and have a homebrew, it will be alright’.