¿ä¸® ±â¼ú : Eight Common Cooking Mistakes


Á¦Ç° ¡í ½ÃÀå±Ô¸ð ¡í Á¶¹Ì, ¿ä¸®

¿ä¸® ±â¼ú : Eight Common Cooking Mistakes

¿ä¸®ÀÇ ±â¼ú
- Á¶¸®¹ý : ¿Âµµ¿Í ½Ã°£, ºÐÀڿ丮
- ¿ä¸® Tip : ¸À Àç·á, ÀϹÝÀûÀÎ ½Ç¼ö
- dz¹Ì ÀÌ·Ð

1. Poor Salting Ability

¡°The ability to salt food properly is the single most important skill in cooking.¡±  Thomas Keller

The single biggest mistake that I see in cooking is the inability to salt food properly, whether this occurs out of fear of salt and high blood pressure or perhaps the cook is leaving the salting up to the consumer. Food pleasure can be highly dependent on achieving the magic level of 1.0–2.0 percent sodium chloride. The junk and snack foods that I¡¯ve studied are uniformly consistent on this level of salt addition (average 1.6 percent).
So how do you achieve this desirable 1.0–2.0 percent salt level? Luckily, and by no small accident, humans tend to all like the same level of sodium chloride; salt the food to your taste, and it will be fine for your guests. Don¡¯t be shy. Chef Keller sometimes calls for ¡°aggressive¡± seasoning—some foods need more salt than others (for instance, potatoes). Many vegetables are very low in sodium and can use an extra hit; meats are much higher in sodium and need less. Properly cooked meals should need no added sodium by the consumer—unless, of course, one adds a sprinkle of sea salts to finish the plate or on foods that require sodium addition (French fries). In fact, some of my chef friends are offended if the customer salts his/her own food! In Chinese restaurants soy sauce and other seasonings are added to the food during preparation, so there is little need to add more. Drowning fine Chinese food with soy sauce is just as insulting to the chef.
So why do humans like so much salt in their foods? It¡¯s a combination of factors: the body has a limited ability to store salt in body tissues so there is always a need for sodium. Humans, being hairless, have sweat glands that can secrete surprisingly large amount of sodium; and nervous tissue is critically dependent on sodium for proper functioning. Hence, salt preference and craving is always in excess of our needs.

The Pleasures of Brining

About five years ago, I started brining food and realized a new dimension in flavor and moistness. In fact, you can now overcook the meat and still have an acceptable sensory result. Heat creates flavor but draws moisture out of the muscle fibrils to create an unpleasant dryness. Brining solves the dryness problem and allows more Maillard flavor compounds to be formed. For recipes, see the Food Network Web site, Cook¡¯s Illustrated, or Russ Parson¡¯s How to Read a French Fry, one of my favorite food-science cookbooks. The most common method of brining involves adding salt (and sometimes sugar) to water, and then immersing the meat for as little as one hour or up to ten days. In my brines, I always add antioxidant herbs that reduce off-flavor formation, like oregano, rosemary, thyme, and garlic. They protect the unsaturated fatty acids from going rancid due to oxygen exposure.
The second technique is the one used by top chefs like Thomas Keller and Judy Rodgers of the Zuny Café. They simply salt the meat, wrap in plastic, throw it back in the fridge, and let the salt penetrate the meat for a minimum of one day.2 This method, according to Rogers, helps hold moisture in the meat for better and more uniform browning, resulting in a more flavorful  product. Salting, of course, adds sodium––a primary and powerful hedonic tastant.

2. Poor Seasoning Ability

Seasoning not only involves salt but the application of ¡°flavor principle¡± herbs and spices as well. Seasoning also creates flavor complexity, reduces off-flavor formation, increases orosensation, and creates a memory for that dish. And when the diner or consumer is hungry again, the exact ¡°flavor principles¡± of the dish must be recreated for the same pleasure response (evoked qualities) to occur. For example, if you make roast chicken using a spice blend of oregano and rosemary, and the food is eaten and enjoyed by your family, the next time you cook it (and want to hear, ¡°Boy, does that smell good¡± again), you need to recreate that exact spice blend.
The easiest way to flavor food is to use the spice blends in the stores—many excellent blends are now found at the local grocer. Just remember to store them in a cool, dry place—and certainly not above the oven or next to the stove burners. As I have discussed, I am a great fan of Emeril¡¯s Original seasoning mix, but there are many brands to choose from, so experiment. Paul Prudhomme has a line of seasonings for almost every taste and palate. McCormick¡¯s Grill Mates offer bold flavors and larger particle sizes that add visual and oral appeal. And for brining, I buy Lawry¡¯s seasoning mix by the 5-pound tub from Smart & Final.

Using Herbs and Spices Summary3
• Fresh herbs are preferred in many applications, such as baking, and roasting, and they are absolutely essential in making stocks, sauces, and soups.
• Use three parts of fresh to one part dried.
• Dried herbs stale quickly; store them in a cool, dry place, out of the light, and not above the stove.
• Fresh herbs retain the flavor-active essential oils—dried contain less than 10–20 percent of these oils.
• Avoid using these in dried form: parsley, basil, chives, ginger, tarragon, and dill.
• The best dried herbs are: bay leaf, oregano, marjoram, thyme, sage, nutmeg, and cinnamon.
• Fresh herbs can be bitter; resist adding more than what the recipe specifies.
• Grow these herbs and vegetables in pots: thyme, rosemary, basil, chives, green onions, cutting celery, and oregano. Be forewarned, the perennial herbaceous plants (thyme, oregano, and marjoram), if planted in the open garden, will naturalize and become a weed.

Learn the techniques of blooming and toasting spice/herb blends. Blooming is cooking spice in a little butter or oil first and then adding the rest of the recipe. Toasting refers to heating spice seeds or nuts (such as coriander or cumin seed) first in a heavy pan prior to grinding. Both techniques increase aroma complexity, add cookivore flavors, and enhance solubility.4

3. Poor Saucing Ability

I¡¯ve mentioned several times that dry food is ¡°sensory death.¡± The simple goal is to create food that generates saliva and aids in mastication and flavor release. Given the option of a sauce with a meal, most people will prefer a sauce and will actively use it during eating. French cuisine is based on sauces, vinaigrettes, and emulsions; Chinese food (stir-fry) is enrobed in a sauce. But what about dry foods like salty snacks? Why can we consume them without choking? Potato chips may be low in moisture, but their thin structure (which melts down quickly) and higher fat and salt content create surprisingly large amounts of saliva upon chewing.
Many good cookbooks include recipes for sauces when making a dish. I am always surprised how many home cooks don¡¯t bother with their preparation. I find that the most fun part of cooking is making a tasty sauce for any given dish. We have a neighbor who likes to come over just for the steak sauce I created by using a brown sauce base, reduced with red wine and shallots. Cooks make food; chefs create sauces. Elevate your own cooking by learning how to make them. Whether it is a simple butter-lemon sauce or a fancy béchamel or buerre rouge—you can master this.
In creating a dish, the sauce could contribute to more than half of all the eating pleasure; it contains the taste-active solutes, increases salivation, promotes positive hedonic feedback, and aids in mastication. For a most excellent discussion on the creation and value of saucing (and haute cuisine in general), see the discussion in The Perfectionist (p. 223) by Rudolph Chelminski. He discloses that the grandmother of all sauces is the simple deglazing: pour water or wine or vinegar in a pan cooked with meat to dissolve the tasty brown bits (fond); after pouring out the excess fat, of course. Pan juices are then concentrated over high heat so that the sauce is reduced by at least half. The problem is the watery nature of the result—a runny sauce. The Chinese solve this problem with cornstarch or arrowroot; the French solution or ¡°liaison,¡± however, is butter, cream, egg yolks, or mustard.

(For a hilarious view on saucing see page 73 of Anthony Bourdain¡¯s latest book, The Nasty Bits, in which he relates a conversation with a hot new chef named Donovan Cooke. Although I can¡¯t repeat what he said, he does boil down saucing to its essence.)

4. Canned Versus Fresh

I grew up on canned food and quickly grew weary of its tinny flavor, muted colors, and not-found-in-nature textures. To eliminate bacterial contamination, the canned foods undergo a ¡°retort¡± process, where the sealed container is subject to many minutes of high heat, and the food is usually in a water bath with added calcium chloride. The combination of heat and calcium creates off-flavors and unusual textures. Canned green beans are especially scary; the ¡°classic¡± dish of green beans with canned mushroom soup and canned onion rings probably contributes 100 percent of the daily requirement of tin. Certain foods, however, seem to hold up better to this product than others. However, by using a sensory trick I learned from Julia Child, canned food can be made to taste bright and fresh again (within reason). Julia, in her recipe for brown sauce (Mastering the Art of French Cooking) says that the flavor of canned beef can be disguised by using finely minced onions, carrots, celery, parsley sprigs, bay leaf, thyme, and tomato paste. Chef Child is also very fond of the special combination of bay leaf and thyme—the Keller duo spice mix. Julia¡¯s vegetable and spice combination not only covers up the unpleasant canned tastes but creates a much more savory flavor character. Hence, the judicious use of these flavor ingredients may eliminate the nasty aromatics associated with canned or dried foods, and pre-packaged rice or stuffing mixes.
I tested the theory that processed foods can be improved with the addition of fresh ingredients. Much to my surprise, I found little success with certain foods (canned gravies) and good success with others (canned corn and tomatoes). Canned whole pinto beans become glorious if you first sauté onions and garlic with a little butter and oregano, then add the beans, and slow simmer for about an hour. Canned refried beans (already flavored), however, are hopeless and cannot be resuscitated by any magic I possess. Why? I speculate that since retort heating is in a closed container, and essentially without access to oxygen, non-food, and unfamiliar flavor compounds are created from the added spices and herbs. This explains why the aseptic process, whereby the food is quickly sterilized by short term, high heat conditions, and filled into pre-sterilized containers—has much less off-flavor generation.
The key point in breathing sensory life back into foods is to use fresh ingredients for the herbs and vegetables, nothing dried or processed (except bay leaf, pepper, cinnamon). Fresh thyme, oregano, rosemary, summer savory, and marjoram have essential oils that will completely (well, almost) eliminate the canned (retort) aromas. If fresh spices are not available, there is one last sensory trick. A few tablespoons of butter, ¨ö teaspoon of Old Bay Seasoning and, 1 tablespoon chopped onion make an excellent refreshing mixture. Just saute this mixture first, then add the food and simmer for a few minutes.

5. Poor Emulsion-Creation Abilities

One of the great discoveries of food pleasure is that humans love an emulsion. In my research, I discovered that emulsions highly concentrate the hedonic solutes (ingredients that taste good) and deliver a pleasure blast to the taste buds. Good cooks and chefs know this principle, and it is well worth pursuing to perfection (Keller is a master emulsifier). I believe the most pleasurable sauces are those emulsified by egg yolks—mayonnaise, hollandaise, and béarnaise. And egg yolks contain taste-active components of their own. Keller takes this to the next culinary level by creating solid foods that are emulsions, such as mashed potatoes.
The simplest emulsified sauce is the vinaigrette, a little acid and fat thrown together with an emulsifier. Keller writes in his Bouchon cookbook of ¡°the sensuous nature of the fat¡± and the ¡°flavor brightening¡± of the acid as the perfect combination. He calls it the ¡°amazing tool¡± for the cook—the ¡°perfect sauce.¡± We now know that acid increases salivation and food arousal. And acidity is a strong trigeminal stimulant, both oral and nasal. We have seen how Keller adds a little vinegar to many of his sauces to ¡°increase arousal¡± or to be more physiologically correct ¡°attention to stimuli.¡± Keller states that the perfect combination of vinaigrette is three parts fat and one part acid—but make sure the ingredients are fresh, or your emulsion will be mediocre.
Top chefs are obsessed with sauce-making, and the average cook would do well to learn at least some of the more rudimentary techniques of deglazing, reductions, and simple compound butter creation.

6. Food Temperature Handling

Eighty percent of all food is served either hot or cold; until recently, the hedonic mystery of food temperature remained hidden. Hot or cold food stimulates dynamic contrast in the mouth when the food temperatures return to body (oral) temperature. As Dr. Bob Hyde has explained, it is the changing nature of temperature in the mouth that the brain finds rewarding. Hot or cold food also activates taste bud sensation without a person actually tasting anything. Since many taste sensations are inherently pleasant—sweet, salty, and umami—pleasure is activated automatically. French chefs know this and serve food piping hot. In fact, they even heat the plates. Mexican food is often served on burning hot plates. How often have you heard the waiter caution, ¡°Watch out, hot plates!¡± Contrast the hot food with a cold margarita, and this is fine dining indeed.
Most home cooks are busy and can¡¯t always keep the food hot, but here is one simple tip that works well for even the most hurried moms. Casserole dishes can be placed in a heated 250oF oven for safekeeping and then pulled out as needed. If the food is in a dish with no lid (like hamburgers fresh off the grill), just take some aluminum foil and cover the food; it¡¯s a simple but effective way to keep food warm. As the temperature of the food drops, so does the pleasure, with every little degree. Why cook gourmet burgers and then serve them lukewarm? Would you serve ice cream melted? Of course not—it¡¯s supposed to change temperature and melt in your mouth! The oral cavity had the greatest ability of any body tissue to handle high temperatures. Scalding coffee that is a pleasure to the palate creates first degree burns if spilled. Humans, as cookivores, like hot food.
My wife thinks I am a little fanatique on this topic, but I put all dishes in a warmed oven for safekeeping if they can¡¯t be served right away. After all, you didn¡¯t come to my house to eat hospital or airline food. (Yes, I know, some airlines serve excellent fare. For an entertaining discussion see Airlinemeals.net.) In the food pleasure equation, we eat for both calories and sensation, and a major part of the sensation is the temperature of the food.

7. Poor Development of Taste-Active Compounds

Cooking involves heat and the generation of flavor-active compounds that excite the palate (orosensation) and activate taste receptors (hedonic solutes). Good cooks and skilled chefs know that culinary techniques and special ingredients can do both. In the chapter on secret-weapon pleasure foods, we are introduced to ingredients that will improve the flavor of most everything you will prepare. And the simple secret for creating flavorful compounds in your cooking is as simple as 375oF. Magic happens to foods cooked at this temperature and above. Maillard reactions (sugar and protein interactions) create all those nice brown and roasted flavors. Sugars caramelize, and salty potentiators emerge from the food depths to create hedonic sensations.
For example, in Bourdain¡¯s excellent recipe for onion soup, the onions are slowly cooked for twenty minutes, and he then adds flavor-rich ingredients like balsamic vinegar, dark chicken stock, port, and bacon. Thomas Keller, however, takes this roasting principle to the limit and cooks his onions for four hours! I recently slow-roasted a version of Keller¡¯s soffritto, a highly flavored onion-tomato-garlic sauce used as a foundation for many Italian and Spanish dishes (Bouchon cookbook). During the cooking process the caramelization of the onions (sucrose, sulfur compounds, and pyruvic acids) and the breakdown products of tomatoes (lycopenes, fruit acids, and MSG) produce some of the tastiest and most aromatic compounds I have ever experienced. Just agitating the cooking pan during cleaning released aromas and flavor that sent me back to the backyard BBQ and my poulet rôti. The Bouchon cookbook is worth the purchase just to learn the makings of the flavor–rich or ¡°building-block¡± preparations: garlic, tomato and onion confit, soffritto, piperade, basil puree, house vinaigrette, basic roux, Mornay sauce, and maître d¡¯hôtel butter.

8. Dried Versus Fresh Spices

We have discussed in this book the importance of spices in good cooking. Fresh and dried herbs and spices have their place, but most chefs prefer to use fresh whenever possible in wet-cooking applications. Dry rubs and marinades, of course, utilize the dried versions, and if they are of high quality, the results can be very good indeed. Luckily, some spices (seeds, hard fruits) dry well. These include garlic, onions, black pepper, nutmeg, bay leaf, Chinese five-spice (my favorite), cinnamon, and mace. But leafy herbs do not dry well: chervil, tarragon, parsley, and basil. Use them fresh, or do not use them at all. Why add stale and musty aroma notes to your cooking?
Fresh herbs worth growing are tarragon, rosemary, thyme, basil, sage, and oregano. Fresh rosemary just oozes with flavor resins. Add one sprig of rosemary or thyme in a pot of Rice-A-Roni (a favorite), and watch it remove and rejuvenate the dried flavors and increase food pleasure. All boxed preparations fall prey to dried and stale flavor blends, especially when the spice mix calls for leafy ingredients (parsley is the worst offender). Another trick to remove the bad flavors is to add fresh or canned tomatoes to the rice or pasta during cooking; this assumes, of course, that you like the rice with an added Spanish flair. The tomato acids neutralize offensive aromas and the natural MSG in tomatoes boosts umami sensations.
Please try the classic spice combination that Thomas Keller and Julia Child use so often—bay leaf and thyme. As I have discussed, 2006 research suggests that these spices contain flavor actives with strong binding activity to vanilloid and possibly CB-1 receptors. This adds increased orosensation (similar to adding cayenne), perhaps even increased food pleasure (marijuana receptor binding), and greater mouthfeel (tactile).






Network  ¡í µÎ³ú, ¸¶À½, ¿å±¸

³úÀÇ ÀÛµ¿¿ø¸®, Áöµµ¿ø¸®

°¨°¢ ±â°ü
º¸»ó½Ã½ºÅÛ
- ÇнÀ ÆÄÆäÃ÷
- ¸ñÀû µ¿±â ºÎ¿© ȸ·Î

½Ä¿å mechanism
- Food Pleasure

file.txt
file.txt