Cooking for Geeks

About a month ago, I read about the above mentioned book in some blog or another. Fortunately, Amazon allows one to 'look inside', so I was able to see whether this would be a suitable book for me. 'Suitable' is an understatement: this is a book for which I have waited 30 years, although I probably didn't know that.

It's a not very well kept secret that my first (and currently only) degree is in Food Science. The degree was based on four main subjects: biochemistry, analysis, microbiology and technology. I was strong on the first three but no so much on the fourth, which might be considered a problem when one considers that most graduates from my degree course found an opening in an industrial company. I tended to work more on the analysis side, and had stints with Schweppes and two 'public' analysts, the latter being laboratories whose customers tend to be local authorities or private people.

Emigrating to Israel effectively prevented me from continuing to work in the food field, as I have lived on a kibbutz from day one, and in those days, it was anathema for members to work outside of the kibbutz. Of course these days, the situation has changed completely and it seems rare for a member to work inside the kibbutz.

Although I have always cooked, my 'glory days' were when I lived as a student in a commune in London; I would cook dinner once or twice a week for up to ten people, although occasionally I would cook for up to thirty people. This cooking had virtually nothing to do with my studies but plenty to do with the fact that my mother, alei'a hashalom, was an excellent cook and ran a small catering business at one time.

Although I did work in the kibbutz kitchens, I wouldn't call this cooking. At times it was weight lifting and at times it was managing the flow of hot trays in and out of a huge oven, but not cooking.

Only in the past six years or so have I really been cooking at home, and in that time I have always looked to expand my cooking horizons. I often joke that I enjoy cooking but not eating, a fact which has probably damped my enthusiasm at times (because someone has to eat the food!). Over the years I have expanded my repertoire whilst acquiring new equipment; this expansion has often been recorded here.

But for most of the time, I've simply been following recipes in the time honoured fashion. One learns a recipe then starts changing it slightly over time until it eventually becomes something different. I find that I have to do this frequently as most British or American recipes don't match the requirements of an Israeli palate, and sometimes it's difficult to find the same ingredients.

'Cooking for geeks' is partially an explanation of the chemistry and physics of cooking (something which didn't fit into my degree course), partially about the joys of experimentation in the kitchen and partially explaining cooking to someone who would feel more comfortable in writing a computer program than cooking a proper meal (as opposed to ordering pizza). The most interesting part of the book at the moment (it's a book which one dips into, as opposed to reading it from start to finish) is the correct temperature at which to cook meat, so that one protein denatures whilst another does not.

So far, I've only cooked one meal according to the book, a simple meat stew. The book states that a long, slow cook is needed in order to convert collagen into gelatin: it's just as well that I bought a slow cooker a few months ago. Whilst the meat in the stew was cooked perfectly, there were some problems with other ingredients - my wife would prefer that I peel potatoes before cooking them (all the nutrition is contained just under the skin!), and the beans were slightly undercooked and bitter. I can easily change one variable - soak the beans in water for a longer period - and repeat the experiment.

Flushed with a sense of adventure, I tried sweet and sour chicken from a recipe which might have resulted in something similar served as the Chinese restaurant at which we ate in Prague. I discovered two things: one cannot deep fry in a wok, and that corn flour is not the same as corn flour. That last statement needs amplifying, as it is a result of mistranslating a term from English into Hebrew. Many recipes use corn flour as a thickener - this is basically starch, which absorbs the water in the food and builds a polymer (see the book!); this corn flour is a white powder. But 'corn flour' is also flour made from corn, and is a golden powder, similar to bread crumb powder. It's the type of flour that one would make tortillas from. Both products sort of have the same name in Hebrew: the white powder is called 'cornflor' whereas the golden flour is 'kemach tiras' (literally, corn flour). Mistakenly, I had been buying the second type of flour when I should have been buying the first type - this is why my sweet and sour sauce refused to thicken!

The food itself tasted quite good but looked terrible. The problem with the sauce has now been rectified, but I don't know what I'm going to do about deep frying the chicken, as this is a type of cooking which is banned in my kitchen. Theoretically if the oil is hot enough and the food dry enough, then deep frying is ok, but in practice things are always different. Anyway, I don't have a pan in which to deep fry. I think that I'm going to try a recipe for slow cooked sweet and sour chicken, which has a higher probability of succeeding.