The Most Important Tool in the Kitchen - Your Brain

Illustration by my good friend Bradley "Doc" Cripe.  Amazing artist*, philosopher, and all around good egg.

It seems like the more complex life becomes, the less people think about stuff.  I don't know why that is.  Are we too dependent on the things that are external to us without having to put forth any effort?  Television, smart phones, computers, I'm looking in your general direction!  I personally think that it may be the case.  I contend that you need to take ownership an put forth the effort to understand what you are doing, no matter what it is.  Take cooking for example.  Like it or not, cooking, albeit something that everyone can master, is complex, even at a basic level.  Biology, physics, and chemistry are hard at work in the food world, even when we aren't.  Once you get into the game, it gets even busier and you can't expect to sit back and let things sort of happen.  If you do, you will be faced with disappointment most of the time.

So, here is my point.  I can't tell you how many times I have heard someone complain about making a recipe that didn't turn out.  Too salty, dry, mushy, whatever.  They even say that it seemed like a lot of salt, or that it seemed like a long time to cook.  My response is "Who's in charge here?"  The recipe?  No, the cook is, and it is their responsibility to catch these things before they become problems.  I'm not advocating that you need the skills and insight of a professional chef, but at the same time, you are in charge of something akin to a lab experiment each time you make a meal.  Listen to that little voice that is trying to warn you that you are about to screw up. Most of the time when I screw up, and yes, I still screw stuff up, it is because I ignored that little voice.  When things go awry, it usually not come as a huge surprise because I remember that voice that I ignored.  Can things go awry even when you are on top of your game?  You bet.  But a lot of stuff falls under rookie mistakes and most of them are preventable.  Everyone makes these mistakes from time to time regardless of experience level (although I would guess Eric Ripert makes way, way less of them than I do).  When I started cooking I made these types of mistakes because I didn't know any better.  Now, it's because I wasn't using my brain.  Hey, the title says that it is an important tool, but you first need to use it.  Most of the time the prevention of problems is as simple as taking the few seconds to just think about what you are doing.  Which brings me to the chicken soup example.

When you make chicken soup, you need to start at the beginning.  Seems obvious at first, but maybe not.  Let's think about this for a moment from the perspective of someone who wants homemade chicken soup for supper.  The though process should go something like this.  What's in chicken soup?  Do you have the ingredients on hand?  How long does each ingredient take to cook? Are you using prepared stock?  Is the chicken that you are going to add to it already cooked?  How long does each type of vegetable take to cook?  How long does it take to cook noodles?  Once you start to think about all this stuff, you can start to see the soup come together in your mind and you can build the time-line.  I probably goes something like this:  Brown your meat and reserve.  Then sauté some aromatic vegetables in the pot in some reserved fat from the meat.  Add stock and bouquet garni of aromatic herbs along with some salt.  Simmer until the soup has some body.  You may be adding other ingredients during the simmering process depending how long they need to cook.  Remove bouquet.  Add cooked chicken and dried noodles.  Cook until noodles are tender.  And, if you are the son of a German mother, drizzle in some beaten eggs while stirring to form egg "ribbons."  That is a really basic example, but you get the point.  If you throw everything together and cook it until the ingredient that needs the longest cooking time is done, your noodles will be mush and your chicken may have fallen apart into strings.  Even something simple needs to be planned out to some level.  That is not to say a peanut butter sandwich needs much planning, if at all, but most things can benefit from this to varying degrees.  On the other end of the spectrum, many dishes that would be considered advanced, will probably fail spectacularly if a fair amount of planning isn't employed.

Another area that can be problematic, even for people who are very good at thinking their way through a recipe, is determining the quantity of food to prepare.  Typically, this is not too difficult, but it gets more sketchy when you start dealing with foods that change drastically in volume.  Greens and mushrooms are shining examples of this.  These items cook down to a shadow of their original volume.  This is where that brain comes in again.  When you choose mushrooms for a meal, you first need to understand that they yield much less, depending on what you start with.  Let's use a simple button mushroom, or cremini, because they are fairly common.  This example is for something like a side of stewed mushrooms to accompany a steak dinner.  First, I like to remove the stem, because they are a bit woody.  Don't worry, you can save them for soup stocks, so nothing is wasted.  You can see that, before you even cook them, you are losing volume.  Once they stew down, a full pot of mushrooms will be reduced to about half.  The reason mushrooms are my favorite example is because I have been to countless meals where the mushrooms need to be rationed because the cook failed to account for loss.  I typically plan for 1/2 - 3/4 pounds of fresh mushrooms per person depending on their affinity for them.  I hate to run out, but if I make too much, they are excellent left over, or can be repurposed into mushroom soup, or into scrambled eggs.  See, always be thinking.  Same thing with greens, such as spinach.  A huge pot of greens will not amount to much.  In fact they are even worse than mushrooms, it's just that greens are not served very frequently in this area, which is a shame.

I have and will continue to make mistakes in the kitchen.  But they are much easier to swallow when it is something out of my control rather than inattention to detail.  And when it is your fault, accept it and learn by it.  A final note: Everyone makes mistakes but don't view them as failures, but rather a learning opportunity.  You always learn more from them then you do from your successes, and are not to be feared.  So, go forth and boldly cook, and above all, have fun.

 

 

*I have seen Doc draw things on a bar napkin that I would have framed and hung it in my house.