What Einstein Told His Cook (32 page)

Do microwaves change the molecular structure of foods?

Yes, of course they do. The process is called “cooking.” All cooking methods cause chemical and molecular changes in our foods. A cooked egg certainly has a different chemical composition from a raw one.

Do microwaves destroy the nutrients in food?

No method of cooking will destroy minerals. But heat will destroy vitamin C, for example, no matter how the food is cooked.

Because microwave heating is uneven, parts of the food may be subjected to much higher temperatures than in other methods, so there is the possibility of some vitamin destruction. But even if microwaves destroyed all of the vitamin X in your dish, there certainly wouldn’t be any nutritional harm in eating an occasional dish that doesn’t contain vitamin X. In a balanced diet, every dish doesn’t have to contain every vitamin and mineral.

Why does microwave-cooked food cool off faster than food cooked in a conventional oven?

This answer may strike you as disappointingly simple: The microwaved food may not have been as hot to begin with.

Many factors, such as the type, quantity, and thickness of the food, affect how it will heat in a microwave oven. If, for example, the chosen on-and-off cycle of the magnetron isn’t exactly right for the particular food and container, or if the stirring and/or rotation aren’t thorough, or if the container isn’t covered to keep the steam in, then the heat may not be distributed uniformly throughout the food. The outer parts may be scalding hot, but the inner parts may still be relatively cool. Then the food’s average overall temperature will be lower than you think, and it will cool to room temperature faster.

In a conventional oven, on the other hand, the food is surrounded by very hot air for a relatively long time, and the heat is given plenty of time to work its way into all parts of the food. Thus, the food’s temperature will eventually be the same as the oven’s air temperature (unless you’re deliberately making a rare roast, for example), and it will take longer to cool off.

There’s another reason. In a conventional oven, the cooking vessel gets as hot as the air in the oven and conducts its heat straight into the food. But “microwave-safe” containers are deliberately designed not to get hot. Thus, food from a microwave oven is in contact with a container that has remained cooler than the food, and that saps away some of its heat.

FINALLY, HERE ARE TWO
strange microwave mysteries that I was asked to solve by anxious and bewildered home cooks.

When I cook fresh peas in the microwave, the water boils up and spills out of the container, yet when I heat canned peas in the same way, they behave themselves. What’s the difference?

Microwave energy is absorbed primarily by water in the food. The waterlogged canned peas and their surrounding liquid absorb microwaves at pretty much the same rate and will therefore get hot more or less equally. When the water begins to boil, the peas are at about the same temperature, whereupon you undoubtedly consider them to be done and stop the oven.

The much drier fresh peas, on the other hand, don’t absorb microwaves as readily as the surrounding water does, so the water heats faster. But the relatively cool peas prevent the water from being heated uniformly. At the same time, the peas are acting as bubble instigators (Techspeak: nucleation sites), encouraging the water to erupt exuberantly wherever there are hot spots. All this happens before the peas are adequately cooked and you deem them ready to remove from the oven.

Try using a less-than-full-power setting, in which the oven zaps the food on an intermittent schedule, giving the water time to distribute its heat through the peas. That way, they’ll be cooked before the water has a chance to boil over.

Better yet, buy frozen peas. The producer has tested the best way to cook them in a microwave oven and the directions are right there on the package.

A lot of buck passing. Oh, you mean in your oven?

Relax. Don’t sue. There was no metal in your vegetables. I’ll bet it was mainly the carrots that got charred, right? Here’s what probably happened.

Frozen foods usually contain ice crystals. But as I pointed out earlier, solid ice doesn’t absorb microwaves nearly as well as liquid water does. The defrost setting on microwave ovens therefore doesn’t try to melt the ice directly, but operates in short, food-heating blasts, leaving time between blasts for the heat to distribute itself and melt the ice.

But you didn’t use the “defrost” setting, did you? (Or maybe your oven doesn’t have one.) You set the oven for a high, constant heating level, which raised localized portions of the food to extremely high temperatures without allowing enough time for the heat to dissipate throughout the bowl. So those localized spots got burned and charred.

Why the carrots and why the sparks? (You’ll love this.) The peas, corn, beans, and whatever all have rounded shapes, but the carrots are usually cut into cubes or oblongs with sharp edges. These thin edges dried out and charred faster than the rest of the vegetables. Now a carbonized, sharp edge or point can act just like the tip of a lightning rod, which attracts electrical energy toward itself and thereby prevents it from striking anywhere else. (Techspeak: Electrically conducting sharp points develop highly concentrated electric field gradients around themselves.) The highly concentrated, carrot-attracted energy is what made the sparks.

I know this sounds a bit farfetched, but it’s quite logical. It has happened before. Next time, use the oven’s “defrost vegetables” or other low-power setting. Or else just add enough water to the bowl to cover the vegetables.

Honest, your oven isn’t possessed by the devil.

T
ODAY’S COOKS, LIKE OTHER
artists, have their own figurative palettes and paintbrushes in the form of an arsenal of equipment that makes old tasks easier and new tasks possible. Today’s kitchens boast a variety of mechanical and electrical devices ranging from the simplest mortar and pestle to the most technologically sophisticated oven and range.

As a species we have progressed so far from wood fires, hot stones, and clay pottery (will future archaeologists unearth bread machine shards from the early twenty-first century?) that we may not even know how some of our tools work. We use them, and often misuse them, without fully understanding them.

Microwave ovens were just the beginning. Come with me now into a kitchen filled with such high-tech gadgets as magnetic induction coils, light ovens, thermistors, and computer “brains” that sometimes seem to know more than you do. Along the way, we’ll learn how to use our familiar old frying pans, measuring cups, knives, and pastry brushes to best advantage.

In the end, we’ll wind up alongside Alice in Wonderland, a fitting place to terminate our journey through the only places on Earth where miracles really do happen every day: our wild and wonderful kitchens.

UTENSILS AND TECHNIQUES

THE SOUND OF ONE PAN STICKING

Why doesn’t anything stick to nonstick cookware? And if the nonstick coating won’t stick to anything, how do they get it to stick to the pans?

S
ticking is a two-way street. In order for sticking to occur, there must be both a stick-er and a stick-ee. At least one partner must be tacky.

Quiz
: Identify the sticky one in each of the following pairs: Glue and paper. Chewing gum and a shoe sole. A lollipop and a little boy.

Very good.

In every case, at least one of the pair must be made of molecules that enjoy latching onto others. Glue, chewing gum, and lollipops contain notoriously fickle molecules; almost anything can be the object of their affections. Adhesives are deliberately created by chemists to form strong, permanent attachments to as many substances as possible.

But way over on the other hand, there’s PTFE, that black coating on the nonstick pan. Its molecules simply refuse to be either the sticker
or
the stickee, no matter what its potential partner may be. And that’s extremely unusual in the chemical world of intermolecular attractions. Even Super Glue won’t stick to PTFE.

What does PTFE have that other molecules don’t have?

This sticky question arose in 1938, when a chemist named Roy Plunkett at the E. I. DuPont de Nemours Corp. concocted a brand-new chemical that chemists call polytetrafluoroethylene, but which was fortunately nicknamed PTFE and trademarked by DuPont as Teflon.

After appearing in a variety of industrial guises, such as slippery bearings that don’t need oil, Teflon began to show up in the kitchen in the 1960s as a coating for frying pans that would clean up in a jiffy because they didn’t get dirty in the first place.

Modern variations are known by a variety of trade names, but they’re all essentially PTFE, coupled with various schemes to make it stick to the pan, which as you can imagine is no small trick. I’m getting to that.

But first, let’s understand why an egg tends to stick to a non-nonstick pan in the first place.

Things may stick to one another (and be unstuck from one another) for reasons that are primarily either mechanical or chemical. Although there are weak attractions between protein molecules and metals, the sticking of an egg to a regular frying pan is largely mechanical; the congealing egg white grabs onto microscopic crags and crevices. Scratching your frying pans by the too vigorous use of metal spatulas makes things even worse. I use PTFE-coated spatulas, even on my metal-surfaced pans.

To minimize mechanical sticking we use cooking oil. It fills in the crevices and floats the egg above the crags on a thin layer of liquid. (Any liquid would do that, but water wouldn’t last long enough in a hot pan to do much good unless you use lots of it, in which case you’ve got yourself a poached egg instead of a fried one.)

The surfaces of nonstick pan coatings, on the other hand, are extremely smooth on a microscopic scale. Because they have virtually no cracks, there’s nothing there for food to grab on to. Of course, glass and many plastics share this virtue, but PTFE is resilient and stands up well to high temperatures.

But chemical sticking is also important. The world’s strongest stickinesses, such as in adhesives, are largely due to those molecule-to-molecule attractions I mentioned, which then require chemical warfare to break down. For example, paint thinner (mineral spirits) will get the chewing-gum residue off your shoe after mechanical scraping has failed.

In the kitchen, the atoms or molecules of a frying pan surface can form weak chemical bonds to certain food molecules. But the molecules of PTFE are unique in that they won’t form bonds to anything. Here’s why.

PTFE is a polymer, made up of only two kinds of atoms, carbon and fluorine, in a ratio of four fluorine atoms to every two carbon atoms. Thousands of these six-atom molecules are bonded together into gigantically bigger molecules that look like long carbon backbones with fluorine atoms bristling out like the spikes on a woolly caterpillar.

Now of all types of atoms, fluorine is the one that least wants to react with anything else once it has comfortably bonded with a carbon atom. PTFE’s bristling fluorine atoms therefore effectively constitute a suit of caterpillar armor, protecting the carbon atoms against bonding with any other molecules that may come along. That’s why nothing sticks to PTFE, including the molecules in an egg, a pork chop, or a muffin. PTFE won’t even let most liquids adhere to it strongly enough to wet it. Put a few drops of water or oil on a nonstick pan and you’ll see.

Which brings us (finally) to the question of how they get the coating to stick to the frying pan in the first place. You can now guess that they use a variety of mechanical, rather than chemical, techniques to roughen up the pan’s surface so that the sprayed-on PTFE coating can get a good foothold. Dramatic improvements in those techniques have made today’s nonstick cookware vastly superior to the thin, flaky, scratchable coatings of yesteryear. Some manufacturers now even dare you to use metal implements on their pans.

There are quite a few kinds of nonstick coatings, and most of them are still based on PTFE. One example is the Whitford Corp.’s Excalibur, used on several brands of quality cookware. In this process, tiny droplets of white-hot, molten stainless steel are blasted at the surface of a stainless-steel pan. The droplets splatter and weld themselves onto the pan, leaving a jagged, toothy surface. Several layers of PTFE-based formulations are then sprayed on, building up a thick, strong coating that is held tightly by those microscopic steel teeth. The Excalibur process works only on stainless steel, but other processes, such as DuPont’s Autograph, work on aluminum.

FEAR OF FRYING

(…with apologies to James Barber, Jill Churchill, Josh Freed, Ed Goldman, Barbara Kafka, Rosa A. Mo, John Martin Taylor, Virginia N. White, and all the other authors who couldn’t resist using this pun)

I want to buy a high-quality, general-purpose frying pan, but there are so many kinds of metals and coatings that I can’t figure out what’s best. What should I be looking for?

F
irst, loosen up your wallet, because you said “high quality” and that doesn’t come cheap.

The ideal frying pan will distribute the burner’s heat uniformly over its surface, transfer it quickly to the food, and respond promptly to changes in heat settings. That boils down to two qualities: thickness and heat conductivity. Look for a thick pan made out of a metal that conducts heat as efficiently as possible.

A frying pan should be made of heavy-gauge metal, because the more bulk it has, the more heat it can hold. When you add room-temperature ingredients to a hot, thin pan they can rob enough heat from the metal that it falls below the optimum cooking temperature. Moreover, any hot spots on the range burners will go straight through the bottom of a thin pan to the food without being dispersed sideways, resulting in burned or scorched spots on the food. A thick pan, on the other hand, has enough heat reserves or “heat inertia” to maintain a steady cooking temperature in spite of these vicissitudes.

The most crucial property of a frying pan’s metal is how well it conducts heat; it must have what scientists call a high thermal conductivity. That’s true for three reasons.

First, you want the pan to transmit the burner’s heat quickly and efficiently to the food. You wouldn’t get much frying done in a pan made of glass or porcelain, which are terribly slow conductors of heat.

Second, you want all sections of the pan’s surface to be at the same temperature, so that all the food gets the same treatment despite unevenness in the burner’s temperature. Gas burners have separate tongues of flame lapping at different parts of the pan’s bottom, while electric burners are coils of hot metal with cooler spaces in between. A high-conductivity pan bottom will quickly even out these irregularities.

Third, you want the pan to respond rapidly to changes in burner settings, both up and down. Frying and sautéing are constant battles to keep the food at a high temperature without burning it, so you must frequently adjust the burner. A pan made of high-conductivity metal will respond quickly to these changes.

Okay, so which metal is best?

And the winner is…silver! The best frying pan in the world would have a heavy bottom made of the one metal which conducts heat better than all others: silver.

You say you can’t afford a sterling silver frying pan? Well, there is a very close second: copper, which conducts heat 91 percent as well as silver. Too much copper in the diet can be unhealthful, however, so the insides of copper pans must be lined with a less toxic metal. Tin was the standby for many years, but it is soft and melts at only 450°F. Modern metallurgical technology can bond thin nickel or stainless-steel layers to the insides of copper pans.

In my opinion, then, you can find nothing better than a heavy copper frying pan lined with stainless steel or nickel. Unfortunately, you may have to hock your wok to buy one. It’s the most expensive cookware because copper is more expensive than aluminum or stainless steel, it’s a difficult metal to work, and bonding steel or nickel linings onto it isn’t easy to do on a mass-market scale.

Then what’s the next-best metal? Aluminum. It’s very cheap, yet it conducts heat 55 percent as well as silver does—still no slouch in the heat transmission derby. A thick aluminum pan can do a fine job of frying and sautéing, and it has the advantage of being only 30 percent as heavy (dense) as copper.

BUT (there’s always a but): Aluminum is susceptible to attack by food acids, so it, too, is often lined with a nonreactive coating such as 18/10 stainless steel: an alloy that contains 18 percent chromium and 10 percent nickel. A hard stainless steel layer also conquers the main problem with aluminum: its relative softness. It scratches easily, and food will stick to a scratched frying pan surface.

There is another way to protect aluminum, however. Its surface can be electrochemically converted into a layer of dense, hard, nonreactive aluminum oxide by a process known as anodizing—passing an electric current between the aluminum and another electrode in a sulfuric acid bath. Calphalon is one popular brand of anodized aluminum cookware. The oxide layer, normally white or colorless but blackened by a dye in the acid bath, serves both to protect the aluminum’s surface—it’s 30 percent harder than stainless steel—and to protect it from acids, although the oxide is susceptible to alkaline chemicals such as dishwashing detergent. The anodized surface is also stick-resistant, but not actually nonstick. A really heavy anodized aluminum pan is certainly worth considering. It should be at least 4 millimeters thick.

At the bottom of the frying pan quality heap is solid stainless steel, which is the worst conductor of all among the common skillet materials: only 4 percent as good as silver. It can be shiny and pretty when new, but I call it “shameless steel” because it claims not to corrode or stain, yet it really does; salt can pit it and it discolors at high temperatures.

The individual virtues of copper, aluminum, and stainless steel can be combined by layering the metals, as we’ve seen with stainless-steel-lined copper and aluminum. All-Clad’s Master-Chef pans, for example, have a core of aluminum sandwiched between two layers of stainless steel. Their Cop-R-Chef pans are a sandwich of aluminum between a stainless inside and a copper outside, but the copper is largely cosmetic; it isn’t thick enough to compete with the arm-and-a-leg French solid copper pans. And speaking of layers, you can opt for a nonstick coating on the interior surfaces of many of these pans

Finally, most inexpensive of all and in a class by itself is that old, black cast-iron skillet that comic-strip wives used to hit their husbands over the head with. It is thick and heavy (iron is 80 percent as dense as copper), but a poor heat conductor: only 18 percent as good as silver. Thus, a cast-iron skillet will be slow to heat, but once heated—and it can be taken up to a couple of thousand degrees without warping or melting—it will hold onto its heat tenaciously. That makes it an excellent pan for certain specialized uses in which a high, uniform temperature must be held for a long time. No true southerner would make fried chicken in anything else.

You should certainly keep one handy for dealing with domestic fowls and domestic fouls, but it’s not the general-purpose tool you inquired about.

MAGNETIC MAGIC

What’s the best way to store my kitchen knives? I’ve read that keeping them on a magnetic rack somehow damages their blades. Is that true?

N
o. Believe it or not, a magnetic rack might actually keep your knives sharp longer. In fact, in one of those slick catalogs of expensive gadgets that no one needs, I even saw a magnetic housing for storing your razor, allegedly to keep the blade sharp between shaves. (How it would otherwise get dull between shaves was not explained.)