COCINA
Gems from a generous food-science guru
Posted on Thu, Mar. 27, 2008
By MARICEL E. PRESILLA
Food scientist and author Harold McGee wants you to know searing does not seal in meat juices.
Friends of Harold McGee know they can count on him to answer any cooking question at the click of a keyboard. The author of the encyclopedic On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (Scribner, 2005) is one of those rare scholars who finds as much satisfaction in sharing his knowledge through personal interaction as through writing.
I have come to think of him as the proverbial family physician of old, perpetually on call. When he stays at my home, as he did last week, our conversations quickly evolve into a kitchen Q&A.
``Harold, why does my egg cake [huevos chimbos] absorb more syrup when it is hot from the oven than when it's cold? Why does the red cabbage turn blue when I boil it?''
NO MORE TEARS
My assistant, Paloma, calls him Profesor Cebolla (onion), not in jest but with reverence for the simple tip he taught her: To keep a raw onion from stinging the eyes when chopped, chill it in ice water first.
A born teacher, McGee has an uncanny ability to explain complex scientific concepts in ways anyone can understand. It helps that he is unassuming, patient and genuinely kind. Those qualities, together with his keen intellect, have endeared him to the brightest avant garde chefs of Spain, including Andoni Luis Aduriz of the celebrated Basque restaurant Mugaritz, who wrote an admiring prologue to La Cocina y los Alimentos: Enciclopedia de la Ciencia y la Cultura de la Comida (Debate, 2007), the recent Spanish translation of McGee's masterwork.
LORE GOES TO THE LAB
If there is one thing I have learned from my friend and mentor, it is that much conventional wisdom about cooking is simply fiction.
Putting kitchen lore to the test is a recurrent theme in the Harold McGee Lecture Series, a course he has begun teaching at the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan. Open to the public (and conducted in collaboration with two of the school's top guns, Dave Arnold and Nills Noren), it includes three experiment-packed, six-hour sessions and a detailed syllabus that in itself is worth the $1,600 price.
Among the myths he debunks is the long-held belief that searing meat seals in the juices.
''This idea was proposed by the 19th century German chemist Justus von Liebig. It sounds scientific, but it is completely false,'' he says. ``. . . While searing certainly adds flavor to the meat, juiciness is related to the meat's degree of doneness -- the rarer or fatter the meat, the juicier it will be.''
Then there is the widely accepted belief that sticking an avocado pit in a bowl of guacamole will keep it from turning brown because of some mysterious chemical reaction.
''What the pit does is to block oxygen from the guacamole, and we show the class that the same effect can be obtained by inserting an inert object like a light bulb,'' he says. ``A more effective way to keep guacamole from turning brown is to cover its surface with plastic wrap.''
Home cooks can benefit greatly from McGee's lessons about low-temperature cooking for tough cuts of meat. For melt-in-the-mouth results, he says, cook a meat stew, uncovered, in a low oven (160 to 180 degrees). If you cover the pot, the stew will boil, causing muscle protein to lose water and dry out, he explains.
Uncovered, the meat's connective tissues will slowly dissolve into gelatin, adding succulent tenderness to stew. That's how I cooked a Peruvian-style lamb stew on Easter Sunday, and the meat came out juicy and fork-tender.
A WAY OF THINKING
Thinking like a scientist in the kitchen begins with humility and the realization that ''knowledge is incomplete,'' McGee says.
``We are not giving the students final answers on anything. We are giving them a way of thinking about food that would serve them for the rest of their lives -- for example, being curious and skeptical and being willing to play with their food in order to understand it better.
``Sometimes cooks are so focused on making the perfect whatever that they forget to play with the ingredients to see what happens.''
Culinary historian Maricel E. Presilla is the chef/co-owner of Cucharamama and Zafra in Hoboken, N.J. Her latest book is The New Taste of Chocolate.
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