About twenty years ago, celebrated food scientist, author, and personal hero Harold McGee made a simple statement: contrary to popular belief, searing meat before roasting it does not “lock in the juices.†” Now, saying this to a cook was like telling a physicist that rocks fall upward
or an Italian that pizza was invented in Iceland. Ever since the mid-nineteenth century, when German food scientist Justus von Liebig had first put forth the theory that searing meat at very high temperatures essentially cauterizes its surface and creates a moistureproof barrier, it had been
accepted as culinary fact. And for the next century and a half, this great discovery was embraced by world-famous chefs (including Auguste Escoffier, the father of French
cuisine) and passed on from mentor to apprentice and from cookbook writer to home cook.
You’d think that with all that working against him, McGee must have used the world’s most powerful
computer, or at the very least a scanning electron microscope, to prove his assertion, right? Nope. His proof was as simple as looking at a piece of meat. He noticed that when you sear a steak on one side, then flip it over and cook it on the second side, juices from the interior of the
steak are squeezed out of the top—the very side that was supposedly now impermeable to moisture loss! It was an observation that anyone who’s ever cooked a steak could have made, and one that has since led restaurants to completely revise their cooking methods.
Indeed, many high-end restaurants these days cook their steaks first, sealed in plastic, in low-temperature water baths, searing them only at the end in order to add flavor. The result is steaks that are juicier, moister, and more tender than anything the world was eating before von Liebig’s erroneous assertion was finally disproved.
The question is, if debunking von Liebig’s theory was such a simple task, why did it take nearly a hundred and fifty years to do it? The answer lies in the fact that cooking has always been considered a craft, not a science.
Restaurant cooks act as apprentices, learning, but not questioning, their chefs’ techniques. Home cooks follow the notes and recipes of their mothers and grandmothers or cookbooks—perhaps tweaking them here and there to suit modern tastes, but never challenging the fundamentals.
It’s only in recent times that cooks have finally begun to break out of this shell. Restaurants that revel in using the science of cookery to come up with new techniques that result in pleasing and often surprising outcomes are not just proliferating but are consistently ranked as the best in the world (Chicago’s Alinea or Spain’s now-closed El Bulli, for
example). It’s an indication that as a population, we’re finally beginning to see cooking for what it truly is: a scientific engineering problem in which the inputs are raw ingredients and technique and the outputs are deliciously edible results.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not out to try and prove to you that foams are the way of the future or that your eggs need to be cooked in a steam-injected, pressure-controlled oven to come out right. I’m not here to push some sort of newfangled, fancified, plated-with-tweezers, deconstructed/reconstructed cuisine. Quite the opposite, in fact.
CONTENTS
CONVERSIONS
PREFACE BY JEFFREY STEINGARTEN
INTRODUCTION: A NERD IN THE KITCHEN
WHAT’S IN THIS BOOK?
THE KEYS TO GOOD KITCHEN SCIENCE
WHAT IS COOKING?
ESSENTIAL KITCHEN GEAR
THE BASIC PANTRY
1 EGGS, DAIRY, and the Science of Breakfast
2 SOUPS, STEWS, and the Science of Stock
3 STEAKS, CHOPS, CHICKEN,
FISH, and the Science of Fast-Cooking Foods
4 BLANCHING, SEARING,
BRAISING, GLAZING,
ROASTING, and the Science of Vegetables
5 BALLS, LOAVES, LINKS,
BURGERS, and the Science of Ground Meat
6 CHICKENS, TURKEYS, PRIME
RIB, and the Science of Roasts
7 TOMATO SAUCE, MACARONI,
and the Science of Pasta
8 GREENS, EMULSIONS, and the
Science of Salads
9 BATTER, BREADINGS, and the
Science of Frying
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