Salt

After learning so much about seasoning and flavoring last week, I had to check what Harold McGee said about salt.  Jennifer and I have a copy of On Food And Cooking, and anymore we like to check it whenever we hear of something interesting, when something doesn't go as planned in the kitchen, when we buy a new veggie from the farmer's market and have no idea how to optimally prepare it.  Given how much Chef Porter hyped up salt, and how I realized I'd completely taken salt for granted, I knew McGee would have something interesting to say.

Turns out he has a lot to say, with about a half dozen pages dedicated to salt.  I don't know if beef gets a half dozen pages.

My favorite passage on salt from On Food And Cooking:

Salt is like no other substance we eat.  Sodium chloride is a simple, inorganic material: it comes not from plants or animals or microbes, but from the oceans, and ultimately from the rocks that erode into them.  It's an essential nutrient, a chemical that our bodies can't do without.  It's the only natural source of one of our handful of basic tastes, and we therefore add it to most of our foods to fill out their flavor.  Salt is also a taste enhancer and taste modifier: it strengthens the impression of aromas that accompany it, and it suppresses the sensation of bitterness.  It's one of the very few ingredients that we keep in pure form at the table, to be added to individual taste as we eat.

My baby's gettin redic in the kitchen

Week Three gettin underway

We're off Monday, so just four more days of these two desk-based classes and I'll have my manager's servsafe certificate and we'll be on to another class.  Right now we're in two classes that run from 5:30-10:10; starting next week it'll just be one class that goes 5:30-10:52 (except for one Thursday that gets out at 10:44.  A whole 8 minute break, booyaa).  So it's about to get even more intensive. 

We'll be in a lab too.  No one's really sure if we're starting with knife cuts, or mother sauces, stocks, or what...but it'll be something ground level like that. 

The class is starting to coalesce.  Most of us are warming up to each other, swapping email addresses, learning more about our lives.  Everyone is curious to learn why we've all come to this point, why culinary school.  Skills range, experience and age range.  Right now my two closest friends are a 50-something man who's done a bit of everything in the world and a 21-year old woman fresh out of the University of Michigan, who's done some traveling, has some catering experience, and has a sarcastic sense of wit.

Actually, I don't remember it on the application but sarcasm must've been an admission requirement.  We're all pretty jaded and everyone - tiny women, old men, everyone in between - everyone swears like sailors.  I love it.  When's the last time you met three dozen diverse adults who were totally at ease with you dropping some shits and some fucks as part of your first impressions?

Someone thinks she's being persuasive

Midterm! Over and done

We had a midterm last night in CA 100, the Culinary Arts 101ish course.  And it was hard, all over the map.  It had some history questions, about Alice Waters, haute cuisine, Escoffier, the de Medicis, the formal names in the kitchen brigade system, nouvelle cuisine.

Questions about tools, pots, and pans: like what's a sauteuse, what's a sautoir, a rondeau, name the three standard floor mixer attachments.

The differences between braising, roasting, steaming, sauteeing, dry heat cooking, moist heat cooking, poaching, how heat conducts and transfers to the foods in each method, what happens to proteins when heated down at the amino acid level, what happens to fiber in veggies when heated, what's al dente, a la minute, au sec.  Names of the pigments in green veggies, white veg, red veg, orange veg.

Converting recipes, how to calculate the recipe quantities from an 8 portion recipe to a 35 portion recipe, calculating food cost, basic P&L cost to revenue algebra.

Taste, flavor profiles, primary and secondary flavors, seasoning v flavoring, what happens to veggies x, y, and z when you add an acid, when you add an alkali, when you cook quick, when you cook slow.

When I finished the test, I left the classroom to go call Marcel.  In the hallway was a random guy with a tray of bite sized food, so I asked him what he had.  "It's uhh...fucking risotto crab cakes.  Grab one."

I did.  They had a squiggle of mustard on them too.  Tasted wonderful.  I think I love fucking risotto crab cakes.

Porterism

Corn syrup never dies, god.  Our bodies...are examples of that.  People are often one big...blob...of corn syrup.

Thought of the day

Reading about achieving balance in menu composition, textures in particular.  One tip on menu textures from my textbook:

"Don't serve too many mashed or pureed foods unless you are running a baby-food restaurant."

Thanks.  I'll remember that.