Photo used under Creative Commons from Flickr.com user panduh
For my last post of the semester, I want to share some advice to help you move from a beginner to a good cook. Here are some tips for understanding the enjoyable and necessary art-science that is food.
Tip one: Try things
Eat out with the goal of finding something new. Buy that weird vegetable at the farmers market. Read about a new food and attempt to make it.
Part of learning about food is having experiences. Yeah, your favorite jar of pasta sauce is delicious, but save it for a proverbial rainy day. There’s a whole food culture out there waiting for you to join in on and an Internet full of recipes waiting for you to bite. Pun intended.
Tip two: Practice
Unless you’re training to become a chef, mastering the Julienne is probably not necessary but learning how to roughly chop your vegetables with a good, nonserrated, knife is. Learn how to get a dark, flavorful sear on a steak. Learn how to make a simple salad dressing.
Really, just cook often. Cooking good food consistently makes menial tasks easier and helps you develop culinary intuition.
Tip three: Appreciate your ingredients
Everything you eat has its own unique and sometimes delicate flavor. Try a vegetable raw before cooking it — it’ll help you understand how its flavor transforms. Try a quality steak, cooked rare and seasoned with only salt and pepper, to fully understand the flavor of the meat.
Lately, the gastronomy scene has been shifting from classic dish replications toward innovations that help ingredients shine. In the words of Chef Jose Andres regarding ingredients, “If you talk to them, they will always tell you a story.”
Tip four: Enjoy cooking
You know that you’re blossoming into a good cook when the process of making food becomes as much fun as consuming it.
So there it is, a casual culinary philosophy, laid out into four easy-to-digest steps. Pun intended, again. The culinary mindset of tips three and four will come in time, so start by trying and practicing. Here are two relatively easy dishes that have helped me develop this mindset. Learning to make these helped me understand how to manipulate basic ingredients into something incredible.
Dish one: Ragu Bolognese
Mastering this dish taught me simplicity. This Italian meat sauce from Bologna traditionally has only seven ingredients: onion, celery, carrot, ground meat, tomato, wine and water. Usually, a drizzle of milk joins the party to lighten things up. Notice there isn’t garlic, dried herbs or anything superfluous in this dish. All of the flavor you need is already there; you just have to be ready to coax it out.
There’s a YouTube video of Food Network’s Anne Burrell making a Bolognese and she explains it perfectly. Caramelize the vegetables; brown the meat; cook the tomato paste; reduce the wine, then add water and simmer for a few hours. With lots of time and attention, those seven or eight ingredients mature into a flavorful punch-in-the-face.
Dish two: Risotto
This dish, without any accompaniments, has six ingredients: butter, onion, rice, wine, chicken stock and Parmesan. Do you notice a theme here? You rarely see a plain risotto because it’s a base for almost anything. Since it’s spring, I’ll be making risotto with asparagus or zucchini. Look up recipes on YouTube.
Risotto is made with medium-grain rice, usually Arborio or Carnaroli, which differs from the usual long grain rice in that it remains chewy and releases starch as it cooks. Making risotto is easy, but it needs almost constant stirring and liquid management to allow released starch to thicken your cooking liquid into a hearty sauce.
To make matters worse, there is no exact cooking time. You stop stirring the risotto when the rice looks, feels and tastes right. Yeah, risotto is scary, and your first batch will probably be a gummy mess or a soupy explosion. Trust me, your third batch will be perfect.
Thanks for reading my sublime scrutiny and pretentious ponderings of the thrice-daily ritual that is food. I hope that you can soon appreciate the science of culinary precision and the art of flavor manipulation. I hope that you can learn to love your ingredients, their preparation and their consumption.
Terps, stay hungry, stay appreciative and stay casual.
