Karen Hill

It depends. (You knew I was going to say that, didn’t you?) A direct comparison is complicated by the fact that there is no such thing as “regular coffee.” We have all had everything from vending-machine dishwater to truck-stop battery acid. Even at home, there are so many ways of brewing coffee that no generalizations … Read more

Acidity often gets a bum rap. Maybe it’s because of all the television commercials for drugs designed to control heartburn and acid reflux. But the acid in our stomachs (hydrochloric acid) is thousands of times stronger than any acid you’ll find in coffee. It’s only when the acid gets out of the stomach, splashing up … Read more

As we have all learned from experience when the etiquette police were looking the other way, the cooling of hot food by blowing on it works best with liquids, or at least with wet foods. You won’t substantially diminish the heat of a hot dog by blowing on it, but hot tea, coffee, and soup … Read more

Freezer burn” has to be one of the more ridiculous oxymorons going. But take a good look at that emergency pork chop that’s been in your freezer much longer than you ever intended. Doesn’t its parched and shriveled surface look as if it had been seared? The dictionary tells us that seared doesn’t necessarily refer … Read more

I hate to see food go to waste too, but in this case freezing the eggs might cause more trouble than they’re worth. For one thing, the shells will probably crack because, as you might expect, the whites expand when they freeze, just as water does when it turns to ice. There’s nothing you can … Read more

The hot-water-freezes-faster paradox has been debated since at least the 17th century when Sir Francis Bacon wrote about it. Even today, Canadians claim that a bucket of hot water left outdoors in cold weather will freeze faster than a bucket of cold water. Scientists, however, have been unable to explain why Canadians leave buckets of … Read more

In Spanish, empanada means “breaded,” derived from pan, meaning bread. But that’s a bit misleading, because in Latin America today an empanada is a filled pastry, almost any kind of pastry made from flour or cornmeal and filled with almost anything imaginable, but usually with meats or seafoods of some kind. We might call them … Read more

Pastry dough must be kept cool during rolling so that the shortening, most often a solid fat such as butter, lard, or Crisco, doesn’t melt and soak into the flour. If it does, your pie crust will have the texture of a shipping carton. Flaky pastry is produced when many thin layers of dough are … Read more

You come home after a hard day’s work. You don’t feel like cooking, and you can’t face the hassle of going to a restaurant. Where do you turn? To the freezer, of course. And like a crowd of football fans, a little voice in your head begins to chant, “DEE-frost! DEE-frost!” Scanning your frozen assets, … Read more

Outdoor grilling is great for meats and fish, but grilling most vegetables can be a problem. Put them on the grate and they tend to fall through into the fire; put them on skewers and some parts will burn while others steam. Roasting vegetables in a hot oven is a lot easier. It results in … Read more

The answer to that question is an unequivocal “It depends.” You can make burned-on-the-outside, raw-on-the-inside chicken equally well over charcoal or a gas flame. As in all cooking, what matters is how much heat the food ultimately absorbs; that’s what determines its done-ness. Grilling infuses the necessary amount of heat by subjecting the food to … Read more

It’s unlikely. But scientific opinion has never been known to discourage people from trying to prove an age-old urban legend. When I was a kid in The Big City in the days before air conditioning, at least one newspaper would cook up an egg-on-the-sidewalk story sometime during the “silly season”, the dog days of summer, … Read more

Many cookbooks assert that all or virtually all of the alcohol “burns off” during cooking (what they mean is that it evaporates; it won’t burn unless you light it). The standard “explanation,” when there is one, is that alcohol boils at 173°F, while water doesn’t boil until 212°F, and therefore the alcohol will boil off … Read more

A Btu is an amount of energy, just as a calorie is an amount of energy. Both are most commonly used to measure amounts of heat. The Btu, which stands for British thermal unit, was invented by engineers, so while it makes sense to the guys who design the stoves, it doesn’t mean much to … Read more

Evaporating water sounds like the simplest thing in the world. Why, just leave a puddle of water standing around and it evaporates all by itself. But that takes time, because the necessary calories won’t flow into the water very fast from the room’s relatively cool air. Even on the stove, where you’re feeding lots of … Read more

As a pot of water is heated and its temperature goes up, more and more water vapor is produced above the surface. That’s because more and more of the surface molecules gain enough energy to leap off into the air. The increasing amount of water vapor carries off an increasing amount of energy that could … Read more

Something about momentum? I’ll bet, because if an object is already falling, in temperature, presumably, it should require extra time and effort to turn it around and make it rise. You first have to kill its downward momentum. That’s all very well and true for physical objects, but temperature isn’t a physical object. When the … Read more

The elevation at La Paz runs from 10,650 to 13,250 feet above sea level, depending on which part of town you’re in. And as you are aware, water boils at lower temperatures at higher elevations. That’s because in order to escape from the liquid and boil off into the air, water molecules have to fight … Read more

Not being a nutritionist, I asked Marion Nestle, professor and chair of the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University. “Fudge factors,” she said. First of all, the actual energy content of a gram of fat is closer to 9.5 calories. But that would only make the discrepancy bigger. The fact is … Read more

A calorie is a much broader concept than just heat; it’s an amount of any kind of energy. We could measure the energy of a speeding Mack truck in calories, if we wanted to. Energy is whatever makes things happen; call it “oomph” if you wish. It comes in many forms: physical motion (think Mack … Read more

At the fish market, select one lively, tail-flipping, claw-raising lobster per person. You pick up a lobster by grasping its back, behind the head. If it droops when picked up, forget it and come back another day; it’s not fresh. Take the lobsters home in a container that allows lots of breathing space and keeps … Read more

To find an authoritative answer, I went to Maine and interviewed several leading chefs and lobstermen. I found two distinct camps: the staunch steamers and the passionate plungers. “I plunge,” defiantly declared the chef at a well-known French restaurant. He plunges his lobsters into boiling water laced with white wine and lots of peeled garlic. … Read more

Mussels are nature’s fast-food gifts from the sea. They are beautiful to behold in their ebony shells, decorated with concentric growth lines. They cook almost instantly (they’re done when their shells pop open) and are very low in fat and high in protein. Their texture is meaty, and they taste of the sea, a little … Read more

We call them all shells because they are worn on the outside, but when we talk about “shellfish,” we’re including two totally different classes of animals: crustaceans and mollusks. Among the crustaceans are crabs, lobsters, shrimps, and prawns. Their shells are horny, flexible plates of hinged “armor.” The top covering of a crab or lobster … Read more

They should be, but they really don’t have to be. That step is often skipped. As they arrive from the ocean or the fish market, live clams generally need to be purged. When they were snatched from their snug little beds in the sand, they pulled in their siphons and clamped their shells together tightly, … Read more

Almost as much human resourcefulness has been expended on shucking clams as on opening childproof medicine bottles, but with far more injuries. People have seriously recommended everything from hammers, files, and hacksaws to execution in the microwave chamber. But brute force is entirely unnecessary, and microwave heat can seriously compromise their flavor. To open clams … Read more

You’re on vacation at the shore, right? Seafood restaurants abound. Many have raw bars, at which hordes of heedless hedonists are slurping hundreds of luckless mollusks that have been forcibly demoted from bivalve to univalve status. It’s only natural to be squeamish about chomping on a creature so recently relieved of its shielding shells and, … Read more

One can imagine several reasons. Merchants assume that anyone who eats caviar regularly is an easy sell. Caviar deserves it. And least romantically, there is a chemical reason for it. Caviar is the roe of the sturgeon, a huge, dinosaur-era fish with armored plates instead of scales. The sturgeon lives primarily in the Caspian and … Read more

Surimi is fish flesh that has been minced and fabricated into crab-and shrimp-like shapes. Developed in Japan to utilize the waste scraps from filleting and to exploit some of the less desirable fish species caught in the nets, it has gained a foothold in the United States as a low-cost alternative to the real things. … Read more

People put up with fishy-smelling fish because they’re probably thinking, Well, what else should it smell like? Odd as it may seem, though, fish needn’t smell like fish at all. When they’re perfectly fresh, only a few hours removed from carousing around in the water, fish and shellfish have virtually no odor. A fresh “scent … Read more

Meats, like wines, can be either red or white. Beef is red; fish and shellfish are generally white. Salmon are pink, rosé, if you like, because they eat pink-shelled crustaceans. Flamingos, if you care, are pink for a similar reason. In the kitchen, we soon learn that white fish flesh cooks much more quickly than … Read more

There are three important things to remember when making gravy: Combine and cook equal parts fat and all-purpose flour. Whisk in the right amount of broth to the consistency you like. Simmer gravy for a total of 7 minutes. The standard proportion for gravy is 1 part fat, 1 part flour, 8 or 12 parts … Read more

It doesn’t have to be either lumpy or greasy. We all know people who can make it both lumpy and greasy at the same time, don’t we? Lumps and grease arise from the same basic phenomenon: Oil and water won’t mix. In your gravy, you want some of each, but you have to trick them … Read more

No. If you have to ask, you don’t deserve them. Pour off the fat, scrape the rest of the “ook” into a jar, and ship it to me by overnight express. Seriously, this stuff is composed of marvelously flavorful juices and gels, and it would be a crime to feed it to your dishwashing machine. … Read more

The stuff is coagulated protein, held together by fat. While it won’t hurt you, it won’t taste good and it’s best to remove it on purely aesthetic grounds. When protein is heated, it coagulates. That is, its long, convoluted molecules unfold and then clump together in new ways. What happened was that some of your … Read more

I’m with you. Why overnight? Are we to believe that daylight somehow interferes with the marinating process? What if it’s only two o’clock in the afternoon when we arrive at the critical point in the recipe? How early can “overnight” begin? If we do leave it overnight, must we proceed with the recipe the moment … Read more

Brining, soaking meat, fish or poultry in a solution of salt in water, is far from new. Surely, at some time in maritime history, someone discovered, accidentally, perhaps?, that meat that had soaked in seawater was juicier and had better flavor when cooked. How does brining work? What does a bath in salt water accomplish, … Read more

Meats don’t spoil because they’re “cured,” which is a catch-all term for any process that inhibits bacterial growth, even at room temperature. But hams can be bewildering. How are they cured? Are all hams salted? Smoked? Do you have to soak them? Cook them? There is no single set of answers to these questions because … Read more

Recipes tell you to “skim the fat” from soups and stews as if it were as easy as peeling a banana. Supposedly, you just grab a spoon and scoop off the layer of fat without removing any of the underlying solids or liquids. But the word skim is a scam. For one thing, it’s hard … Read more

I hate warnings without reasons, don’t you? All they do is dispense anxiety without information. Whenever I see an “open other end” warning on a box, I open the wrong end just to see what will happen. I’m still alive. Bone is a lesser conductor of heat than meat is. For one thing, bone is … Read more

We can take that remark with a grain of sugar, because the word sweet is both overused and misused in gastronomic parlance. It is often used just to mean pleasant tasting and not meant to be taken literally. Perhaps that’s because, of the fundamental tastes that have been identified in humans, sweetness is the one … Read more

Dem bones are an essential ingredient in making a soup, stock, or stew, every bit as essential as the meat, vegetables, and seasonings. Their purpose may not be obvious, however, if we think of them as hard, nonreactive mineral matter. Yes, their structural material is mineral: calcium phosphates, to be specific. But calcium phosphates don’t … Read more

USDA Prime is indeed the finest and most expensive grade of beef. But we have all at one time or another been subjected to a $5.95 (salad bar included) slab of tough, dry “prime rib” rimmed with vulcanized-rubber fat that clearly deserved to be stamped “USDA Inedible.” Is there some misrepresentation going on here? Not … Read more

A freshly cut meat surface isn’t bright red; it’s naturally purplish because it contains the purplish-red muscle protein, myoglobin. But when myoglobin is exposed to oxygen in the air, it quickly turns into bright, cherry-red oxymyoglobin. That’s why only the outer surface of your ground beef is that nice, bright red color that we generally … Read more

There is virtually no blood in red meat. Most of the blood that circulates through a cow’s veins and arteries never makes it to the butcher shop, much less to the dinner table. Not to get too graphic about it, but down at the slaughterhouse, just after the critter is dispatched, most of the blood … Read more

We humans are an omnivorous lot, with teeth and digestive systems well adapted to eating both plant and animal foods. But animal rights activists notwithstanding, it’s an undeniable fact that in our society, meat and fish are most often the center of the plate, the star players in our main dishes. Of the virtually unlimited … Read more

Delve into the intriguing world of hominy grits, unraveling the mystery behind the use of lye in their production and the unique culinary process that transforms corn. Key Takeaways: Explore the traditional method of using lye in hominy grits production. Understand the chemical reaction that occurs during the nixtamalization process. Gain insights into the historical … Read more

Not as dangerous as some well-meaning friends who spread scary stories. But there is a small grain of truth to the story. When potatoes were introduced into Europe in the second half of the sixteenth century, they were suspected of being either poisonous or aphrodisiac or, an intriguing thought, both. (What a way to die!) … Read more

Those chips were sliced from green-surfaced potatoes, and they therefore contain small amounts of toxic solanine, which is not destroyed by frying. It’s okay to eat them, because in order to experience any ill effects you’d have to eat so many bags of chips that you’d turn greener around the gills than they are around … Read more

It’s not green because it’s unripe; potatoes are ready to eat at any stage of growth. And they’re not flaunting the green because they’re a traditionally Irish food. The green color is Mother Nature’s Mr. Yuk sticker, warning us of poison. Potato plants contain solanine, a bitter-tasting member of the notorious alkaloid family, a group … Read more

Vinegar has been known for thousands of years. No one even had to make it in the first place, because it actually makes itself. Wherever there happens to be some sugar or alcohol lying around, vinegar is on the way. Any chemist will tell you without a moment’s hesitation that vinegar is a solution of … Read more

Yup, your lasagne is actually eating holes in the metal. (No reflection on your cooking.) Aluminum is what chemists call an active metal, easily attacked by acids such as the citric and other organic acids in tomatoes. In fact, you shouldn’t cook tomato sauce or other acidic foods in aluminum pots because they can dissolve … Read more

If you’ll pardon the double negative, cream cheese doesn’t contain no calcium. In the jabberwocky world of food labeling, zero is not the same as none. When you come right down to it, there’s no such thing as a zero amount of anything. All anyone can say is that the amount of something is too … Read more

It certainly does sound mysterious that these innocent-looking fine, white crystals with no really distinctive taste of their own should be able to boost the inherent flavors of such a wide variety of foods. The mystery lies not in whether MSG really works, nobody doubts that, but in how it works. As is the case … Read more

Vanilla extract is around 35 percent ethyl alcohol, which has a harsh, biting flavor. Whiskeys and other distilled beverages contain even more alcohol, of course (usually 40 percent), but they are lovingly produced by time-honored flavoring and aging processes that soften the harshness. “Pure vanilla extract,” in order to be labeled as such, must be … Read more

The words tartar and tartare come to us from two different directions. “Tartar” or “Tatar” was the Persian name for Genghis Khan’s horde of Mongols who stormed through Asia and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages. The Tartars were viewed by Europeans as being, shall we say, culturally challenged, or at the very least politically … Read more

Sour salt is misnamed. It has nothing to do with table salt or sodium chloride. In fact, it isn’t a salt at all; it’s an acid. They’re two different classes of chemicals. Every acid is a unique chemical having properties that distinguish it from all other acids. But it can have dozens of derivatives called … Read more

Ammonia itself is an acrid-smelling gas, usually dissolved in water and used for laundry and cleaning purposes. But baking ammonia is ammonium bicarbonate, a leavening agent that when heated breaks down into three gases: water vapor, carbon dioxide, and ammonia. It isn’t used much anymore , if you can even find it, because the ammonia … Read more

Sodium aluminum sulfate and several other aluminum compounds are listed by the FDA as GRAS: Generally Regarded as Safe. About twenty years ago, one study found increased levels of aluminum in the brains of deceased Alzheimer’s victims. Ever since then, suspicions have been circulating that aluminum, whether in food or water or dissolved from aluminum … Read more

The name “water filter” is misleading. The word filtered literally means only that the water has passed through a medium containing tiny holes or fine passageways that screen out suspended particles. When traveling in a country whose water supply is suspect and you ask a waiter whether the water is filtered, an affirmative reply may … Read more

Back in 1986, during a six-month residence in the South of France, I saw something I had never seen in the U.S. The supermarkets kept their milk on the shelves without refrigeration. Instead of bottles or cartons, it was packaged in brick-shaped, cardboard-like boxes. How can they do that, I wondered. Granted, milk is not … Read more

Some of my older readers may remember milk delivered to the doorstep in bottles. I’ve read about it in my history books. The milk had a separate layer of cream at the top. Why? Because cream is just milk with a higher proportion of butterfat and, because fat is lighter (less dense) than water, it … Read more

Heavy cream contains a higher percentage of milk fat (usually called butterfat, because butter can be made from it) than light cream does: 36 to 40 percent fat in heavy whipping cream versus only 18 to 30 percent in light cream. And, if you’re interested, the heavy cream can contain up to twice as much … Read more

The ingredients in the noodles and in the package of flavorings are listed separately, so you can easily find out which contains what. The salt (usually lots of it) is in the flavorings. You might not expect the noodles to contain fat, but surprisingly, that’s where most of it is hiding. I know you’ve always … Read more

There is no such thing as a nonfat edible oil. Fats are a family of specific chemical compounds, and an oil is just a liquid fat. Nor do the sprays have to contain a substitute for oil, because, are you ready?, they are oil. Those handy little cans, so great for coating baking pans and … Read more

While edible fats and oils are ultimately biodegradable, they can gum up the works in a landfill for years. They’re not as bad as petroleum oils, however, which are digestible by only one or two species of bacteria and stay around essentially forever. Small amounts of fat can be absorbed in a couple of paper … Read more

I don’t think you mean boiling point, because in spite of the poetic and sadistic appeal of the expression “boiled in oil,” oil doesn’t boil. Long before it becomes hot enough to think about bubbling, a cooking oil will decompose, breaking down into disagreeable chemicals and carbonized particles that will assault your taste buds with … Read more

They use a lot of corn. Corn is indeed a low-fat food, containing about 1 gram per ear until you slather it with all that butter. But it is by far the biggest crop in the United States, grown in 42 states to the tune of more than 9 billion bushels per year. Nine billion … Read more

European butter has more fat. Commercial butter is 80 to 82 percent milk fat (also called butterfat), 16 to 17 percent water, and 1 to 2 percent milk solids (plus about 2 percent salt if salted). The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) sets the lower limit of butterfat content for American butter at 80 … Read more

Clarifying butter gets rid of everything but that delicious, artery-clogging, highly saturated butterfat. But when we use it in sautéing instead of whole butter, we avoid eating the browned proteins, which could also be unhealthful because of possible carcinogens. Name your poison. Some people think of butter as a block of fat surrounded by guilt. … Read more

All fats fall into three categories. Saturated, polyunsaturated, and monounsaturated fats. I had never noticed the funny arithmetic you mention, but as soon as I received your question I ran to my pantry and grabbed a box of Nabisco Wheat Thins. Here’s what I saw in the Nutrition Facts panel for the amounts of fat … Read more

Oils are hydrogenated, that is, hydrogen atoms are forced into their molecules under pressure to make them more saturated, because saturated fats are thicker, more solid and less liquid, than unsaturated fats. The hydrogen atoms fill in hydrogen-poor gaps (Techspeak: double bonds, which are more rigid than single bonds) in the oil molecules, and that … Read more

Free fatty acids. That is, fatty acid molecules that have been broken off from their fat molecules. Most fatty acids are foul-smelling and bad-tasting chemicals, and it doesn’t take much of them to give a fatty food an off flavor. There are two main ways in which the fatty acids can become disconnected: the fat’s … Read more

Most of us just don’t know the difference between fatty acids and fats. And there is indeed a difference. Every molecule of fat incorporates three molecules of fatty acids. The fatty acids may be either saturated or unsaturated, and they thereby impart those qualities to the fat as a whole. First, let’s see what a … Read more

It sounds silly, but there’s a reason. A quarter-pound stick of typical salted butter may contain 1½ to 3 grams, or up to half a teaspoon, of salt. Different brands and regional products may contain very different amounts. When you’re following a carefully formulated recipe, especially one that uses a lot of butter, you can’t … Read more

Almost everyone has heard that advice: Throw in some chunks of raw potato, simmer them for a while, and they will absorb some of the extra salt. But as with so many common beliefs, this one, to my knowledge, has never been tested scientifically. I took that as a challenge and set up a controlled … Read more

Freshly ground salt is better for the people who sell those fancy salt mills and combination salt-and-pepper grinders in so-called gourmet shops. The idea seems to be that if freshly ground pepper is so much better than the powdered stuff in cans, then why not use freshly ground salt as well? That’s a delusion. Unlike … Read more

Kosher salt is misnamed; it should be called koshering salt because it is used in the koshering process, which involves blanketing raw meat or poultry with salt to purify it. Kosher salt may be either mined or taken from the sea; nobody seems to care. Its crystals, however, must always be coarse and irregular, so … Read more

The terms sea salt and regular salt or table salt are often used as if they denote two distinctly different substances with distinctly different properties. But it’s not that simple. Salt is indeed obtained from two different sources: underground mines and seawater. But that fact alone doesn’t make them inherently different, any more than water … Read more

Virtually every cookbook instructs us to salt the water in which we cook pasta or potatoes, and we dutifully comply without asking any questions. There is a very simple reason for adding the salt: It boosts the flavor of the food, just as it does when used in any other kind of cooking. And that’s … Read more

“Real” salt is sodium chloride. The issue of safety revolves around its sodium content; no one has ever blamed the chloride for anything. The aim of all the substitutes is to lower or eliminate the sodium. Sodium in the diet has long been suspected as a possible cause of high blood pressure, but there appears … Read more

Salt tenderizes meat only to a slight extent. If you read further down the ingredient list of meat tenderizers, you’ll find papain, an enzyme found in unripe papayas. That’s what really does the job. All that salt is there primarily to dilute and spread out the relatively small amount of papain in the product on … Read more

Chemically speaking, absolutely nothing. They’re plain old salt: sodium chloride. But physically speaking, they’re either finer-grained or coarser-grained than ordinary table salt. And that’s all. The number of specialty salts on the wholesale market is astounding. Cargill Salt, Inc., one of the world’s largest salt producers, makes about sixty kinds of food-grade salt for food … Read more

Beneath the surface of Hutchinson, Kansas, and thousands of square miles of its environs lies an enormous deposit of a precious rock-like mineral called halite. There, several huge mining operations extract almost 1 million tons per year, and that’s less than one-half percent of the world’s annual halite production. What do we do with all … Read more

I never use them myself because I don’t view the 15 calories in a teaspoonful of sugar as a serious threat to my existence. But artificial sweeteners are a boon to diabetics and others who want to limit their intake of real sugar. Artificial sweeteners, also called sugar substitutes, must be approved by the FDA … Read more

White chocolate is simply the fat from the cacao bean (the cocoa butter) mixed with milk solids and sugar. It contains none of those wonderful, though inauspiciously brown, cocoa-bean solids that give chocolate its unique character and rich flavor. If you choose a white-chocolate-topped dessert to avoid chocolate’s caffeine, bear in mind that cocoa butter … Read more

To make cocoa, unsweetened chocolate (solidified chocolate liquor) is pressed to squeeze out most of the fat, and the resulting cake is then ground to a powder. There are several types of “regular” cocoa powder, depending on how much fat remains. For example, “breakfast cocoa” or “high-fat cocoa,” as defined by the FDA, must contain … Read more