Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food (13 page)

Probe thermometers are awesome because they use a thermocouple attached to a long heat-safe lead, designed so that you can stick the probe into a piece of meat and set the controller to beep when it reaches the desired temperature. Timers are handy, and if you’ll be doing much baking, one will be critical. But if you expect to be doing mostly cooking, a timer is just a proxy for checking when, say, an oven roast has reached temperature, in which case why not use something that actually checks that? And when it comes to food safety, it’s not possible to “see” what a hamburger cooked to 160°F / 71°C looks like, even when cut in half.

Infrared thermometers are great for taking dry temperatures, such as the surface temperature of a frying pan before you start making pancakes, or ice cream you’ve just made with liquid nitrogen (see
Making ice cream
in
Chapter 7
). The other great thing about them is that they’re instant: point, click, done. You can also use them to take the temperature of liquids in a pan without having to worry about handling a hot thermometer probe or washing it after. Keep in mind, though, that stainless steel is reflective in the IR range, just like a mirror reflects visible light — you’ll end up taking the temperature of your ceiling, not the pan, if you try to meter an empty stainless steel pan. Also, IR thermometers only take surface temperature, so they shouldn’t be used for checking internal temperatures for food safety.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the most overlooked but useful thermometer: your hands. Learn what various temperatures feel like: hold your hand above a hot pan, and notice how far away you can be and still “feel” the heat (thermal radiation). Stick your hand in an oven set to medium heat, remember that feeling, then compare it when you’re working with a hot oven. For liquids, you can generally put your hand in water at around 130°F / 55°C for a second or two, but at 140°F / 60°C it’ll pretty much be a reflexive “ouch!” Just remember to use a thermometer for foods that need to be cooked to a certain temperature for food safety reasons, which we’ll cover in
Chapter 4
.

Tuck a probe thermometer into a quiche or pie to tell when the internal temperature indicates it is done. I pull my quiches out when the temperature reaches 140°F / 60°C. The egg coagulates in the range of 140–149°F / 60–65°C, and 140°F / 60°C is hot enough that the “carryover” heat will just set the egg custard without making it dry.

While you can get away with using your dinner plates or soup bowls for holding some things, you’ll invariably need mixing bowls for working with and storing your ingredients. I recommend two types: large metal bowls (~12 to 16” / 30 to 40 cm diameter) and small glass bowls.

For metal bowls, poke around your nearest restaurant supply store for some cheap stainless steel ones, which should cost only a few dollars apiece. These bowls are large enough to hold cookie dough, cake batter, and soup, and they have enough room for chopped leafy greens that you plan to sauté. You can also toss them in the oven at low heat to keep cooked items warm, something you can’t do with plastic ones.

Small glass bowls are also very useful, especially if you’re using a
mise en place
setup. Measuring out chopped ingredients into small glass bowls ahead of time will allow you to toss the ingredients together much faster during the cooking process. If you have leftovers, just wrap the bowls with plastic wrap and store in the fridge. Look for glass bowls that are all the same size and that stack well. You’ll often find these bowls available at your local hardware store.

In addition to wiping off counters with them, you can use bar towels (typically 12” × 18” / 30 × 40 cm terry towels with some thickness) as potholders, under a cutting board to prevent slippage, or as a liner in a bowl to help dry washed items such as blueberries or cherries. And you can never have enough of them. I keep several dozen on hand in my kitchen.

You can use a bar towel as a potholder to handle dishes or pans that have been in the oven. Fold it in half to double the thickness, and don’t use a wet towel because it’ll steam up and burn you. Some people prefer oven mitts, because oven mitts are typically thicker and don’t have the potential to catch on corners like a towel might.

While you can use consumer-grade plastic containers, the commercial-grade polycarbonate containers used in the restaurant industry are great: they’re rugged enough to last a lifetime, can handle hot liquids, and are designed for holding the larger quantities you’ll be handling for group cooking. Search online for Cambro’s CamSquare containers.

Ubiquitous in commercial kitchens, CamSquare containers are affordable, practically indestructible, and add a certain geek flair. You can flip the lid over and use it as an impromptu cutting board as well.

Look for a strainer that has a metal mesh and a handle long enough to span your sink. Avoid strainers that have plastic parts; plastic isn’t as strong or heat resistant and will eventually break. In addition to the normal application of straining cooked foods like pasta or washing berries, a metal strainer can double as a splatter guard when inverted above a frying pan. Depending on the types of food you are cooking, you might find a spider — a specialized spoon with a wide shallow mesh bowl and a long handle — helpful for scooping out items from pots of boiling water.

You can use a strainer as a splatter guard while pan-frying items such as salmon. Make sure your strainer is wire mesh and has no plastic parts.

For baking, a handheld mixer or stand mixer is pretty much indispensable. Sure, you can use a whisk or a spoon, but when it comes to creaming together butter and sugar, you’ll get better results with an electric mixer that can whip microscopic air bubbles into the mix. Besides a mixer, there are a few other electric devices that are worth their counter space.

Immersion blender.
 Skip the normal blender and go for an
immersion blender
. Sometimes called a
stick blender
, the blade part of the blender is mounted on a handle and immersed into a container that holds whatever it is you want to blend. When making soup, for example, instead of transferring the soup from pot to blender for puréeing, you take the immersion blender and run it directly in the pot. Quicker to use, easier to wash.

Food processor.
 While not an essential, there are times when a food processor makes quick work of otherwise laborious tasks — for example, making pesto or slicing 10 pounds of onions or pulsing pie dough to incorporate flour and butter. They’re expensive, though, and take up space. You might opt for a mandolin, instead, which can also be used to quickly make large piles of julienned (matchstick-cut) veggies.

Rice cooker with slow-cook mode.
 I’m in love with my rice cooker. Actually, that’s not true; I’m in love with the slow-cook mode of my rice cooker, and you should be, too. As we’ll discuss in
Chapter 4
, some chemical processes in cooking require a long period of time at a relatively specific temperatures. This is why you should make room for a rice cooker with a slow-cook mode: you can safely leave it on overnight, or even for a few days, without worrying about either the utility bill or the house burning down (something that you shouldn’t do with almost any other source of heat in the kitchen). This handy appliance makes an entire class of dishes (braised short ribs, duck confit, beef stew) trivially easy. You could just get a slow cooker, but a rice cooker with slow-cook mode will also come in handy for those occasions when you actually want to make rice.

I know, I know...unitaskers. Some unitaskers are worth making space for, though, because of how well they perform their particular tasks.

Box grater.
 A simple box grater for grating vegetables, cheese, and butter (for cutting into pastry dough) can save a lot of time. Sure, you can use a food processor with a grating disk (fast but lots of cleanup) or a paring knife to cube (tedious), but there are times when it’s just easiest to plop a box grater on a plate or cutting board and grate away.

Simple Beef Stew

In a pan, sear 1–2 lbs / 0.5–1 kg cubed stewing beef (it should be a cheap cut for stewing; more expensive cuts won’t have as much collagen, which will affect the texture, as we’ll discuss in
Chapter 4
). After browning the outsides of the beef, transfer the meat to the bowl of the rice cooker. Using the same pan, sauté one or two diced onions (red, yellow, white — doesn’t matter). After the onions have started to caramelize, transfer them to the rice cooker. Toss in a can or two of diced tomatoes (enough to cover the beef). Add seasonings — such as oregano, thyme, or rosemary — and salt and pepper. You can add diced potatoes, canned beans, or other starches as well. I sometimes throw in a tablespoon of ketchup and port to add more flavors. Leave to slow cook for at least six hours. You can start the cooking in the morning before work and arrive home to a quick and easy dinner of beef stew.

Pepper grinder.
 You want a 9” Unicorn Magnum Plus. Really, that’s the best pepper mill out there; never mind what it sounds like.

Garlic press.
 If you like a good strong kick of garlic in your food and don’t mind taking a shortcut, a garlic press makes it easy to get a quick fix. By all means, if you’re the type who strongly believes in always doing things the right way — a sharp knife, dicing it with precision, and reveling in the texture and nuance — then skip the garlic press. But if you’re a garlic lover who, after a long day at work, just wants to cook a quick five-minute meal, a garlic press will make it easier to use your favorite ingredient. The trick is to get a garlic press with a good handle and good “teeth,” so that you can pop in a clove
unpeeled
and squirt out fresh garlicky goodness. Then, make sure you pull out the just-pressed skin and wash the garlic press
right away
. With these two tricks, you can add garlic to a dish with about five seconds of work. Be advised that garlic squirted out of a garlic press will quickly oxidize, so save pressing the garlic until the moment you’re ready to cook it.

The Best Tool in the Kitchen?

Don’t be shy about using your hands! After a good scrubbing with soap, they’re just as clean as a pair of tongs and infinitely more dexterous. Tossing a salad? Putting veggies on a plate? Dropping cookie dough onto a baking sheet? Use your hands. It’s faster, easier, and means one less utensil to wash.

I was making crepes at a friend’s dinner party several years ago and one of the other guests was an executive chef for a prominent Boston restaurant. We were in the kitchen together chatting about our respective fields of software and cooking. He stopped me as I went to flip the crepe with a spatula, showing me how to pull it back and flip it using my hands instead. Flipping this way allows you to feel how much the crepe is sticking to the pan and avoids the awkward angling-in of a spatula against the sidewall of the frying pan. While I still usually use a spatula (my fingers aren’t made of asbestos like a full-time cook’s!), the idea of getting in there with my fingers has definitely made me more comfortable grabbing foods and moving them where they need to be. Just don’t burn yourself, and remember to wash your hands, especially when working with raw meats.

1-2-3 Crepes

Whisk or purée until entirely mixed, about 30 seconds:

• 1 cup (250g) milk (preferably whole milk)
  
• 2 large (120g) eggs
  
• ⅓ cup (40g) flour (all-purpose)
  
• Pinch of salt
  

Let rest for at least 30 minutes, preferably longer, so that the gluten in the flour has a chance to thicken the batter. (Stash the batter in the fridge if you’re going to leave it for more than half an hour.)

Making crepes is like riding a bicycle: it takes practice before it’s easy. Expect to completely screw up the first few you make (training wheels!), and keep in mind that while the batter is easy and the technique simple, the error tolerances are actually pretty tight, so don’t get discouraged! Like riding a bicycle, it’s far easier to go fast; going slow is hard.

Start with a nonstick frying pan over medium-high heat, heating up the pan for about 30 seconds, or until a drop of water sizzles when dropped into it. Once your pan is at temperature, plan to work quickly: butter, wipe down, pour batter in while swirling, flip, flip
again
, add fillings, plate, and repeat. Because they’re fast and cheap, crepes are great for dinner parties or brunches, but you should
definitely
practice beforehand.

Butter:
 Grab a cold stick of butter with the wrapper partially pulled back, and using the wrapped part as a handle, spread a small amount of butter around the pan.

Wipe down:
 Use a paper towel to thin out the butter over the surface of the pan, wiping up almost all of it (and on repeats, any crumbs left behind from the previous crepe). The pan should look almost dry; you want a super-thin coating of butter, not noticeable streaks.

Pour:
 Pour in the batter while swirling the pan: pour about ¼ cup / 60 ml of batter into a 10” / 25 cm pan, adjusting as necessary (you want enough batter just to coat the bottom evenly). While pouring in the batter with one hand, use your other hand to hold the pan in the air and swirl it so that the batter runs and spreads over the surface of the pan. If you can pour batter out of the pan after swirling, you’re using too much. If you’re short on batter, you can “spot pour” a bit in to fill in the gap. This is also the point at which you should check the heat of the pan: it should be hot enough that the batter develops a lace-like quality: little holes all over the crepe as the steam tunnels up through the batter. If your crepes come out whitish, turn up the heat.

Flip:
 Wait until the crepe begins to brown. Don’t poke, don’t prod; just let it cook. Once the crepe has begun to brown around the edges, use a silicone spatula (one of those folding spatulas works well) to push down the edge all around the circumference. This will release the edge of the crepe so that it lifts off the pan. Carefully grab that little edge to flip the crepe with both hands.

Flip again:
 Let the crepe cook on the second side for half a minute or so, until it’s cooked. The first side should come out a uniformly brown tone, so flip the crepe again before adding the fillings. This will leave the better-looking side on the outside of the finished crepe.

Add fillings:
 Add whatever fillings you like. You can heat and even cook the fillings by leaving the pan on the heat during this step. Or, you can move the crepe to a plate and fill it off the heat if you’re using something cold (e.g., lox, cream cheese, dill). Crepes are a great vehicle for almost any filling, either savory or sweet. If a combination of ingredients works on pizza or in a pie, it’ll probably work in a crepe. Try some of the following combinations:

• Powdered sugar
  
• Lemon juice
  
• Jam
  
• Granulated sugar
  
• Grand Marnier (orange liqueur)
  
• Cheese
  

• Eggs
  
• Ham
  
• Dill
  
• Sausage
  
• Cream cheese
  
• Chocolate ganache or Nutella
  
• Cheese
  
• Lox
  
• Onions
  
• Bananas
  

Notes

• It might not look pretty, but a rolled-up crepe with a light sweet filling is fantastic.
  
• If you have a substantial amount of filling, it’s easier to fold the crepe into quarters or into a square. I put a small amount of the filling on top as well, as a reminder of what’s lurking inside.
  
• When making a crepe with an egg, you can crack the raw egg directly onto the crepe after it’s done cooking but while it’s still in the pan. Use the back of a fork to break the yolk and scramble the egg, smoothing it over the entire surface of the crepe. Drop some cheese on top wherever the egg is setting too fast.