Blog Recommendation: Michael Ruhlman

I have recently developed a love for Michael Ruhlman.  I originally discovered him via the iPhone app Ratio, but have not yet picked up the book that it is supposed to accompany.  And It wasn't until very recently that I started reading his blog. There are recipes, cocktails, food rants, and all sorts of fun stuff. It's a very easy read, the photography on the blog is fantastic, and I often learn something while reading it.  The perfect combination!

I was originally just going to share it on the Puritan Therapy Facebook page, but there were too many posts to really pick just one.  So here is the list of where I think you should start.

1. America- Too Stupid to Cook: Ten thousand times yes! Over the decades marketing has convinced us that many life tasks are just too difficult.  Cooking is not hard.  Cleaning (while obnoxious) is not hard. Sewing is not hard. But marketers have spend millions of dollars and many years trying to convince us otherwise, so that we will buy whatever it is that they are trying to sell.
2. The "No Nitrates Added" Hoax: Another giant "boo!" to marketing. The moral of the story, if you don't understand how food works, you can easily be manipulated by deceptive marketing.
3. Food Fascism: This is one that I experienced myself when I was in Portugal doing my massage training.  I was the black sheep because, not only did I not aspire to be a macrobiotic vegan, but I actually ate RED MEAT! (I would also like to point out that even if you are smoking "organic" cigarettes, it's still highly likely you will end up with a smoking related illness... but I digress)
4. Bacteria! Run Away! Run Away!: This article even has delightful images drawn by Alton Brown! This article addresses the concerns about washing chicken. While I am much more prone to agree with Harold McGee with regards to the chicken stock argument, there is definitely an overreaction with regards to "germs", at least in the US. 
5. Cook Your Own Food Eat What You Want Think For Yourself: Where common sense trumps the most recent news story of what common food will kill you this week.  See, for example, the poor, maligned egg.
6. Friday Cocktail: The old-fashioned with homemade bitters : This gets me on multiple levels.  I do love me a good cocktail, but I also like knowing how to make random things.  I may now need to try making bitters...
7. In Love with French Onion Soup: Lastly, here is one of his food recipes, to give you a taste (pardon the pun) of what they are like.  I have not tried this recipe, but it holds up to what I have come to believe about very old school peasant food recipes.  It is very simple, does not have a lot of complicated ingredients, and does not involve a lot of fancy techniques.  It reminds me of challenges on shows like Top Chef where the chef has been asked to make the judges "last meal".  Inevitably the chef who wins is not the one who composes a highly technical and complicated plate.  The one who wins is the chef who makes the requested dish like their grandmother would make.  Simple, comforting, and well executed.

Not that Michael Ruhlman needs any help from me to gain readership, but I like to promote people who I think are doing good things.

Science and Cooking at Harvard

I saw this link multiple times on my Facebook feed, and even had two people send it to me directly.  My reaction when I saw it was something akin to "aw crap".  I've been going to the lectures throughout the series.  They are after work, and the lines have been getting long enough for me to really not want anyone else to show up, lest I not get in.  I'd heard about the first one from a friend of mine, and when I heard that Harold McGee was going to be speaking, I jumped at the chance. You may not know who he is.  My friend, who invited me to the first lecture, didn't know who he was. He is, essentially, the father of modern food science.

Ever wonder why toast turns brown? Why milk will curdle when mixed with lemon juice? What's the deal with water and chocolate?  Why are beans, in fact, the musical fruit?  Harold McGee knows. His first book "On Food and Cooking" is not a cookbook.  It's much more of a textbook, but about the science of food.  On his blog, Curious Cook, he recently did an article on the required heat for making caramels.  He has also been inspiration for people like Shirley Corriher and Alton Brown. Yes, I may be a little excited about the fact that I now have a signed copy of "On Food and Cooking".

The evening that he spoke, he split the time with Dave Arnold from Cooking Issues. He had some really neat demonstrations with regards to the heat transference of oil vs. water, the effect of liquid nitrogen on marshmallows, and the process of infusing substances with flavor (during which I made the mental connection with why drip coffee is more bitter than espresso, and why the proper steeping time for black tea is only 2-3 minutes). He also brought in a new toy he had for making popcorn. I think the point with this (other than being able to paly with his new toy) was to further demonstrate the ideal gas law in respect to cooking (PV=nRT). But back to popcorn.  If you watch Mythbusters, you may have seen this work before.  If not, here's a clip of how it should work.  Got it? Now let's take a look at what should NOT happen.

It doesn't matter who you are, you can still clear a building with burnt popcorn

This would be what happens when you don't pay close attention to how your valves are sealed, and just keep adding heat to try to get your pressure up.  This photograph, taken by Nate Holstein, captured the moment just after the fire alarm went off. Yes, this professional chef, highly successful restaurateur, and one of the founders of the Museum of Food and Drink set off the fire alarm and evacuated the entire science building at Harvard.

Jose Andres at Harvard University

The best combination of science and entertainment thus far has been the lecture by Jose Andres. Yes, the picture on the screen is of Jello, he was talking about diffusion and  spherification. If you search for images of his food, he composes these absolutely beautiful plates, where he has concentrated flavors, and encapsulated them into a liquid ball with a gelatin skin. Or you can watch even better videos.  The video of him building a Chihuli salad to the right is kind of amazing.

The "Reverse" Cappuccino

This is done by a professional chef.  But, like virtually any form of cooking, with a little science, and the right ingredients, you can do versions at home.  This encouraged a friend of mine and I to do a "sphere" dinner.  For a starter we had olives, then we made spheres of a roasted vegetable soup, had 4 types of meatballs (Italian, Asian, middle eastern and Mexican flavors), and spheres of yogurt served with fresh raspberries and macerated strawberries for dessert.  To top it off, we did a "reverse cappuccino".  This entailed spheres of a yogurt/milk mixture combined with some honey, and some espresso balsamic vinegar caviar on top.  Everything was exceptionally tasty, but nowhere even remotely near as pretty as a world famous chef can do.  Even without having any catastrophic failures, only the reverse cappuccino was pretty enough to even try to photograph.  So now that you've seen the best, here is the layman's attempt.  It was very tasty, but I think that I could use some more practice...

Why am I telling you all this today?  Today is the first day of the Massively Open Online Course (MOOC).  Registration is still open, and it promises to be a lot of fun.  I'll be taking it, and I recommend that anyone else does as well.

You can find the course at: https://www.edx.org/course/harvard-university/spu27x/science-cooking-haute-cuisine/639

Desperately Seeking Samoas

There has been a nasty cold going around Boston, which led to me staying home from work sick for two days. Legitimately sick, not "oops, I have a cough.  Vacation day on the couch for me!".  I am historically very bad at admitting that I am sick and staying home accordingly.  I could be dragging my spleen behind me, and I'd be saying "no, I'm fine, really!"  So this was actually a pretty good accomplishment for me.  The downside was that I fell behind on my blog entries. The upside is the following true story, proving that I am quite happy to laugh at myself.

Despite all of my baking, candying, and other unhealthy food making, I don't tend to keep much in the way of sweets in the house.  I make things, and then tend to just feed everyone around me. Co-workers, friends, my favorite bartenders, pretty much anyone who I think would appreciate a tasty treat. Not only does it give me a way to avoid eating 10 tons of junk, but it also gives me the excuse to keep making new things. Occasionally this backfires, however.

On Monday I had a scratchy throat.  Monday/Tuesday morning I felt as though I'd been gargling razor blades. This was about the time that I decided that work was just not going to happen that day. I proceeded to stay in bed, feeling very grateful for my tablet, so that I could peruse Facebook and chit chat with people at my leisure. Around lunchtime, I realized what I wanted.  I wanted cookies.  Of course, I have no cookies in the house.  There is a 7-11 close by, but I didn't want prepackaged cookies.  That was just not going to cut it.  And there was no way that I was going to attempt to go to a bakery with good cookies.  Let's be honest, there was no way that I was going to leave my apartment. I started the mental rundown of cookie recipes, waiting for my lizard brain to shout "Yes!" (this is, in fact, the way that I tend to make all decisions on what to eat/drink).

Crack, in Cookie Form.

I had found this recipe for homemade Samoas a while back, and had been meaning to try it.  Depending on your girl scout council, you may know them as Caramel Delights.  If neither of these names have any meaning to you, then please, just walk away.  This is not me judging you, this is my attempt to save you from cookie crack. There's a reason that girl scouts sell so many cookies, and Samoas may be that reason.

As soon as I thought of it, my lizard brain decided that is what it wanted, no questions or substitutions.  So I look through the recipe. Basic sugar cookie ingredients, no problem.  Chocolate, no problem (I may have an entire cabinet of chocolate making supplies). Coconut, no problem. Caramels. Fifteen ounces soft caramels. Well, crap. That is a problem. I don't even have a caramel sauce that could be used to fake it. Meanwhile, I know that my lizard brain is not going to be satisfied until I get these cookies. Sigh. 

Well, if there is one thing that I'm good at, it's problem solving. I don't have caramels, and if I just change the flavor profile of the cookie, that is not going to be satisfying.  But! I have sugar. Sugar is in caramel.  And cream. And corn syrup. And despite the fact that I've never actually made caramel, I do know some of the physics of sugar (as a note, I would highly recommend this article by Harold McGee, in which he discusses the melting point of sugar.  It's actually a topic that is still debated). I also had this recipe by David Leibowitz for a salted butter caramel, that I had been tempted to try.

So yes, what I'm saying is that I proceeded to make caramels.  I will give you the full image, for your amusement.  First, I'm sick, with stuffed up sinuses, unshowered, and in my bathrobe.  Because tending to caramel is similar to watching a precocious two year old, it has to be constantly watched.  Therefore, I grab a chair, and sit down in front of the stove, so that I can carefully watch the temperature of the cooking sugar. I can only imagine that the image was rather amusing.  Or maybe it's just me.

The caramels recipe is very good, although they are not "soft" caramels.  The second time I made them I tweaked some temperature points, and used a higher quality butter, and they turned out amazing.  But, that's getting side tracked.  After pouring the caramels into a pan to cool, and sitting down to rest for a little bit, I proceeded to make the sugar cookies, then the topping, and then put them all together. If you opt to try to make your own Samoas, believe it when the recipe says that the coconut burns quickly, and to keep a close eye on it.  The coconut on the edges of the pan will brown very quickly, and not evenly with respect to the rest of the pan.  I did not, however, burn mine (yay!)

I think that I finally had finished cookies at around 7:00 PM. Yes, it was a ridiculous thing to do when sick. Yes, it would have gone a whole lot faster if I'd had proper ingredients. But I gotta tell you, the finished cookies? Totally worth it. Also, I had a little bit of the caramel and coconut mixture left over at the end.  So I made them into balls and just dipped them in chocolate.  All I will say about those is that it is something that will definitely, definitely happen again.