The Benefits of Anal Cooking
By I apologize in advance to anyone who clicked over thinking this was going to be a post about cooking with your butt. Click away now or risk grievous disappointment.
If you’ve ever read “Cook’s Illustrated” or watched the show “America’s Test Kitchen,” you’ve probably come to the conclusion that no home cook has ever successfully made a dish–ever. Every recipe they refine is silly with pitfalls and practically guarantees a craptastic end result to hear the chefs at the Kitchen tell it.
At times I’ll roll my eyes as Christopher Kimball tells me some innocuous dish is inedible 90% of the time. Sometimes it just feels silly. Sometimes I say “Oh, come ON, people! Cooking’s not that tricky!”
I find the Test Kitchen’s approach to cooking anal retentive and officious. But here’s the thing: I have a 100% success rate using their recipes and methods. Let me repeat that: a 100% success rate. (It should be noted that I normally have a roughly 40% success rate, because, as it turns out, most recipes are flawed…which is why I tweak and refine nearly every recipe I use.) So, anyway–surprise twist ending!–I’m a fan of the show and the magazine.
The thing is, I’ve learned an awful lot from the Test Kitchen. And I’ve learned things that I can use in recipes that are decidedly less anal than the Kitchen’s offerings. For instance, I’ve learned that if you want a crisp a potato in the oven, it helps to parboil it, roughen up the surface with salt and oil, then bake in the oven. (The roughed-up surface helps moisture evaporate, creating a drier, crisper potato.) I’ve learned that you can add a lot of instant “long-cooked” flavors to casseroles, soups and stews by adding just a hint soy sauce and tomato paste to them. And I’ve learned that one of the keys to a good slow cooker or slow-braise dish is to add very little liquid…which prevents your food from becoming a waterlogged mess. I’ve also learned that fat separators are godsends. These are AWESOME things for the home cook to know.
And, then there’s the Chicken en Cocotte I made the other day… The recipe was simple, straightforward and unpretentious, and used just a handful of ingredients. It was astonishingly good. Like “Holy crap, I was not expecting that to be that good” good.
So, in the end, I have to come down on the side of the anal cooking. It really can be remarkably rewarding.