Read Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food Online
Authors: Jeff Potter
Tags: #COOKING / Methods / General
Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food (23 page)
As a general tenet when seasoning a dish, start slowly. You can always add more. You can partially mask some tastes by increasing other tastes. If you do end up with one taste being too dominant, try one of the following adjustments.
To counteract: | Bitter | Sour | Umami | Sweet | Salty |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Add... | Increase saltiness or sweetness | Increase sweetness to mask | None known; try dilution | Increase sourness or heat (e.g., cayenne pepper) to mask | Increase sweetness (low concentrations) to mask |
In a pan, melt 1 tablespoon / 14g butter over medium heat. Stir in 1 tablespoon / 8g flour and continue stirring, making sure to combine the flour and butter thoroughly, cooking for several minutes until the mixture begins to turn a blond to light brown color (this butter-flour combination is called a
roux
). Add 1 cup / 256g milk, increase the heat to medium-high, and stir continuously until the mixture has thickened.
Traditional additions include salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Try adding dried thyme, or preheating the milk with bay leaves. If you’re anti-butter, you can use a half butter/half oil mixture.
This sauce can be “subclassed” into other sauces. After making the roux and adding the milk, try the following instances:
Mornay sauce (a.k.a. cheese sauce)
Béchamel sauce with equal parts of Gruyère and Parmesan added. If you’re not a stickler for tradition, almost any cheese that melts well will work.
Bayou sauce
Béchamel sauce that’s had the roux cooked until it reaches a dark brown color. Commonly used in Louisiana-style Cajun cooking, in which onions, garlic, and Creole seasonings are also added.
Mustard sauce
Béchamel sauce with mustard seed or a spoonful of mustard (try one with whole seeds in it). Mustard sauce can be further subclassed with the addition of cheddar cheese and Worcestershire sauce. Or, try sautéing some diced onions in the butter while making the roux and adding mustard at the end for a mustard-onion sauce.
Start like you’re making Béchamel: create a blond roux by melting 1 tablespoon / 14g of butter in a pan over low heat. Stir in 1 tablespoon / 8g of flour and wait for the flour to cook, but not so much that it browns (hence the term
blond roux
). Add 1 cup / 256g of chicken stock or other light stock (one that uses raw bones instead of roasted bones) and cook until thickened.
You can make derivative sauces by adding various ingredients. Here are a few suggestions. Note the absence of specific measurements; use this as an exercise to take a guess and adjust the flavors to suit what you like:
Albufera sauce
Lemon juice, egg yolk, cream (try on chicken or asparagus)
Bercy sauce
Shallots, white wine, lemon juice, parsley (try on fish)
Poulette sauce
Mushrooms, parsley, lemon juice (try on chicken)
Aurora sauce
Tomato purée; roughly 1 part tomato to 4 parts velouté, plus butter to taste (try on ravioli)
Hungarian sauce
Onion (diced and sautéed), paprika, white wine (try on meats)
Venetian sauce
Tarragon, shallots, chervil (try on mild fishes)
Make either a bayou sauce or mustard sauce per previous instructions, playing with the amount of onions and seasoning.
Select a mild fish, such as cod or halibut. Season with a light amount of salt and pepper and transfer to a heated grill. Cook for about 5 minutes, flip, and cook until flaky, about another 5 minutes. Place on serving plate and spoon sauce on top. (Try serving this with simple steamed vegetables!)
Here’s a quick experiment: try making two batches of Aurora sauce, one with 1 cup / 240 ml of light cream and the second with 1 cup / 240 ml of chicken stock. Add ¼ cup / 60 ml of either tomato sauce or puréed tomatoes to each and stir to combine. (If you’re cutting corners and cooking for yourself, you can use ketchup instead of tomato purée.)
What do the two sauces remind you of? Try using the cream-based sauce (sometimes called a pink sauce) on top of ravioli. And the stock-based sauce? Toss in some carrots, celery, beans, and pasta, and you’ve got the beginning of a minestrone soup.
Start with a double batch of Béchamel sauce. Add and slowly stir until melted:
- 1 cup (100g) grated mozzarella
- 1 cup (100g) grated cheddar cheese
In a separate pot, bring salted water to a rolling boil and cook
1\2
cup / 250g pasta. Use a small pasta, such as elbow, fusilli, or penne — something that the sauce can cling to. Test for doneness by tasting a piece of the pasta. When ready, strain and transfer to pan with cheese sauce. Stir to combine.
You can stop here for a basic Mac ‘n Cheese, or spruce it up by mixing in:
- ¼ cup (60g) sautéed onions
- 2 slices (15g) bacon, cooked and chopped into pieces
- A pinch of cayenne pepper
Transfer to a baking pan or individual bowls, sprinkle with bread crumbs and cheese, and broil under medium heat for 2 to 3 minutes, until bread and cheese begin to brown.
Notes
- You can add more milk to the cheese sauce to make it thinner.
- To make your own bread crumbs, you can drop a slice of day-old or toasted bread into a food processor or blender and pulse it. Or, use a knife and chop it up into small pieces.
Say your Aunt Suzie sends you a jar of her famous (or is it infamous?) homemade quince jelly. What to do with it? Someone suggests that you try it with Manchego cheese and crackers and, sure enough, the combination is delicious. But why? One potential explanation can be found in the history of the ingredients: they come from the same geographic region and its corresponding cuisine.
This method for thinking about flavor combinations is expressed in the idiom “if it grows together, it goes together” and encompasses everything from a loose interpretation of what the French call
le goût de terroir
(“taste of the earth”) to what an American gourmand would term “regional cooking” for broad styles of cooking. In addition to the limitation of ingredients based on what can be grown in any given area, regional cooking also involves the culture and tradition of a region. Back to Aunt Suzie’s jelly: Manchego cheese and quince jelly both have long histories in Spain, so the pairing is likely rooted in history.
Given an ingredient, you can look at how that ingredient has been used historically in a particular culture to find inspiration. (Think of it as historical crowdsourcing.) If nothing else, limiting yourself to ingredients that would traditionally be used together can help bring a certain uniformity to your dish, and serve as a fun challenge, too. And you can extend this idea to wines to accompany your dishes, from the traditional (say, a French rosé with Niçoise salad) to modern (Aussie Shiraz with barbeque).
Another way of looking at historical combinations is to look at old cookbooks. A number of older cookbooks are now in the public domain and accessible via the Internet Archive (
http://www.archive.org
), Project Gutenberg (
http://www.gutenberg.org
), and Google Books (
http://books.google.com
). Try searching Google Books for “Boston Cooking-School Cook Book”; for waffles, see
Chapter 3
(
Adapt and Experiment Method
in the downloadable PDF). If nothing else, seeing how much — and, really, how little! — has changed can be great fun. And then there are classic gems, foods that have simply fallen to the sidelines of history for no discernable reason.
Mix one pint of flour, two teaspoonfuls baking powder, one-half teaspoonful salt, yolks of two eggs well beaten, one-half cup milk, one-half cup butter melted, whites of two eggs beaten stiff. Bake in muffin pans or drop loaf fifteen to twenty minutes. If for tea, add two tablespoonfuls sugar to flour.
— from
The Community Cook Book
on Project Gutenberg
http://gutenberg.org
The older the recipe, the harder it can be. One reason is that language has changed. A lot. Take this example (also taken from Project Gutenberg) for apple pie from
The Forme of Cury
, published around 1390 A.D.:
Tak gode Applys and gode Spycis and Figys and reysons and Perys and wan they are wel brayed coloure wyth Safron wel and do yt in a cofyn and do yt forth to bake well.
Almost as bad as a condensed tweet, this translates to: “Take good apples and good spices and figs and raisins and pears and when they are well crushed, color well with saffron and put in a coffin (pie pastry) and take it to bake.” (The “coffin” — little basket — is an ancestor to modern-day pie pastry and would not have been edible at that point in time.) Still, as a starting point for an experiment, the idea of making a mash of apples and pears, some dried fruit, spices, and saffron suggests not just a recipe for pie filling, but also a festive apple sauce for Thanksgiving.
Old recipes aren’t always so concise. Take Maistre Chiquart’s recipe for
parma torte
in
Du Fait de Cuisine
, 1420 A.D. He starts with “take 3 or 4 pigs, and if the affair should be larger than I can conceive, add another, and from the pigs take off the heads and thighs, and...” He goes on for four pages, adding 300 pigeons and 200 chicks (“if the affair is at a time when you can’t find chicks, then 100 capons”); calling for both familiar spices like sage, parsley, and marjoram, and unfamiliar ones such as hyssop and “grains of paradise”; and ending with instructions to place a pastry version of the house coat of arms on top of the pie crust and decorate the top with a “check-board pattern of gold leaf” (diamond-studded iPhone cases have
nothing
on this guy).
Needless to say, you’ll likely need to do some scaling and adaptation of older recipes — again, part of the fun and experimentation! For parma tortes, I worked out my own adaptation. I later found that Eleanor and Terence Scully’s
Early French Cookery: Sources, History, Original Recipes and Modern Adaptations
(University of Michigan Press) includes a nice adaptation. You can peek at it on Google Books; search for “parma torte.”
Besides studying older recipes, you can look at traditional recipes from particular regions to see how ingredients are normally combined. Different cultures have different “flavor families,” ingredients that are thought of as having an affinity for one another. Rosemary, garlic, and lemon are pleasing together — hence, traditional dishes like chicken marinated in those ingredients. It can take time to build up a familiarity with flavor families, but taking note of what ingredients show up together on menus, bottles of salad dressings, or in seasoning packets is a good shortcut.
Modernized version of parma torte, without the gold leaf, from
Du Fait de Cuisine,
by Maistre Chiquart — France, 1420 A.D.
| | Common ingredients | Served with... |
|---|---|---|
Chinese | Bean sprouts, chilies, garlic, ginger, hoisin sauce, mushrooms, sesame oil, soy, sugar | Rice |
French | Butter, butter, and more butter, garlic, parsley, tarragon, wine | Bread |
Greek | Garlic, lemon, oregano, parsley, pine nuts, yogurt | Orzo (pasta) |
Indian | Cardamom seed, cayenne, coriander, cumin, ghee, ginger, mustard seed, turmeric, yogurt | Rice or potatoes |
Italian | Anchovies, balsamic vinegar, basil, citrus zest, fennel, garlic, lemon juice, mint, oregano, red pepper flakes, rosemary | Risotto or pasta |
Japanese | Ginger, mirin, mushrooms, scallions, soy | Rice |
Latin American | Chilies, cilantro, citrus, cumin, ginger, lime, rum | Rice |
Southeast Asian | Cayenne, coconut, fish sauce, kaffir lime leaves, lemon grass, lime, Thai pepper | Rice or noodles |
Common ingredients used in chicken dishes by a few common cuisines. (Note that not all of these ingredients would be used simultaneously.) |
The ingredients used to bring balance to a dish will vary by region. For example, the Greeks use lemon juice in
horta
to moderate the bitterness of the dark leafy greens like dandelion greens, mustard greens, and broccoli rabe, while the Italian equivalent uses balsamic vinegar.
With even a short list of culturally specific ingredients as inspiration, you can create simple marinades and dipping sauces without too much work. Pick a few ingredients, mix them in a bowl, and toss in tofu or meat such as chicken tenderloins or steak. Allow the tofu or meat to marinate in the fridge for anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours, and then grill away.
Set some of the marinade aside before adding the meat for use as dipping sauce.
When creating your own marinade, if you’re not sure about the quantities, give it a guess. This is a great way to build up that experiential memory of what works and what doesn’t.
In a bowl, mix:
- ¼ cup (60g) yogurt
- 1 tablespoon (15g) lemon juice (about ½ lemon’s worth)
- 1 teaspoon (2g) oregano
- ½ teaspoon (3g) salt
- Zest of 1 lemon, minced finely
In a bowl, mix:
- ¼ cup (70g) low-sodium soy sauce (regular soy sauce will be too salty)
- 2 tablespoons (10g) minced ginger
- 3 tablespoons (20g) minced scallions (also known as green onions), about 2 stalks
- 2 tablespoons (40g) honey
Chinese
Bitter: Chinese broccoli; Bitter melon
Salty: Soy sauce; Oyster sauce
Sour: Rice vinegar; Plum sauce (sweet and sour)
Sweet: Plum sauce (sweet and sour); Jujubes (small red dates); Hoisin
sauce
Umami: Dried mushrooms; Oyster sauce
Hot: Mustard; Szechwan peppers; Ginger root
French
Bitter: Frisée; Radish; Endive; Olives
Salty: Olives; Capers
Sour: Red wine vinegar; Lemon juice
Sweet: Sugar
Umami: Tomato; Mushrooms
Hot: Dijon mustard; Black, white, and green peppercorns
Greek
Bitter: Dandelion greens; Mustard greens; Broccoli rabe
Salty: Feta cheese
Sour: Lemon
Sweet: Honey
Umami: Tomato
Hot: Black pepper; Garlic
Indian
Bitter: Asafetida; Fenugreek; Bitter melon
Salty: Kala namak (black salt, which is NaCl and
Na
2
S)
Sour: Lemon; Lime; Amchur (ground dried green mangoes);
Tamarind
Sweet: Sugar; Jaggery (unrefined palm sugar)
Umami: Tomato
Hot: Black pepper; Chilies, cayenne pepper; Black mustard seed;
Garlic; Ginger; Cloves
Italian
Bitter: Broccoli rabe; Olives; Artichoke; Radicchio
Salty: Prosciutto; Cheese (pecorino or parmigiano-reggiano); Capers or
anchovies (commonly packed in salt)
Sour: Balsamic vinegar; Lemon
Sweet: Sugar; Caramelized veggies; Raisins / dried fruits
Umami: Tomato; Parmesan cheese
Hot: Garlic; Black pepper; Italian hot long chilies; Cherry
peppers
Japanese
Bitter: Tea
Salty: Soy sauce; Miso; Seaweed
Sour: Rice vinegar
Sweet: Mirin
Umami: Shitake mushrooms; Miso; Dashi
Hot: Wasabi; Chiles
Latin American
Bitter: Chocolate (unsweetened); Beer
Salty: Cheeses; Olives
Sour: Tamarind; Lime
Sweet: Sugar cane
Umami: Tomato
Hot: Jalapeño and other hot peppers
Southeast
Asian
Bitter: Dried tangerine peel; Pomelo (citrus fruit)
Salty: Fish sauce; Dried shrimp paste
Sour: Tamarind; Kaffir limes
Sweet: Coconut milk
Umami: Fermented bean paste
Hot: Bird chili; Thai chili in sauces and pastes
Examples of ingredients used by different cultures to
balance out flavors. Use this chart as an inspiration to try out new
combinations and take note of how the various flavors change your
perceptions.