Food

Every time I open the refrigerator door, Alex, my Siamese cat, eyes the contents like Willie Sutton peeking into Fort Knox. He knows that that big, white impregnable strongbox contains all the pleasures life has to offer. (He’s neutered.) We humans aren’t much different. Our refrigerators are our treasure houses. Their contents reflect our individual … Read more

Food irradiation is the practice of producers’ subjecting their food products to intense fields of gamma rays, X rays, or high-energy electrons before shipping them to market. Why would they want to do this? Irradiation kills harmful bacteria, including E. coli, Salmonella, Staphylococcus, and Listeria, among others, thereby reducing the danger of food-borne illness. Irradiation … Read more

Saltines, Wheat Thins, Triscuits, Ritz Crackers, grahams, you name it, there’s hardly a cracker anywhere that doesn’t have a pattern of little holes in it. The makers of matzos, the unleavened flatbread of the Jewish Passover, seem to have gone hog wild (you should excuse the expression) on perforations. Matzos are much hole-ier than secular … Read more

Is this a new way of making heat for cooking, after fire, microwaves, and induction ranges? No. The so-called light oven makes heat in pretty much the same way your electric range does: through the electrical resistance-heating of metal. Light ovens have been in specialized commercial use since about 1993 but are now being produced … Read more

Microwave ovens were the first new way of making heat for cooking in more than a million years. Well, now there’s a second one: magnetic induction heating. Magnetic induction has been used for the past decade or so in some European and Japanese food service kitchens, and more recently in commercial American kitchens. They are … Read more

Pressure cookers speed up cooking by making water boil at a higher-than-normal temperature. In the process, they may hiss, rattle, and sizzle like an infernal machine, threatening to redecorate your kitchen in shades of goulash. But your mother’s pressure cooker has been re-engineered to be more mannerly and nearly foolproof. As with all cooking appliances, … Read more

There are two types of so-called instant-read thermometers: the dial-type and the digital readout type. But do they really give you the temperature reading in an instant? Don’t you wish! These reputed speed demons can take anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds to climb up to their highest readings, which are, of course, the numbers … Read more

That depends on what your definition of “is” is. A cup is indeed a cup throughout the land: eight U.S. fluid ounces, whether wet or dry. But you may be wondering: If a fluid ounce is a measure of fluids, how come we use it also to measure flour and other dry solids? And what’s … Read more

Shiny copper is beautiful, and there are some wonderfully effective polishes on the market. But are you a cook or a decorator? The great virtue of copper or copper-clad cookware is that it conducts heat superbly and evenly. For that it deserves to be cherished, not polished. If you try to keep your copper cookware … Read more

I hope I caught you before you put Grandma’s reputed wisdom to the test. The myth says to put a silver dollar in the pan with the mushrooms, and if it didn’t turn dark with tarnish the mushrooms were okay. There is no scientific basis whatsoever to the silver dollar trick. It’s nonsense. I’d call … Read more

The common white or brown button mushrooms in the supermarkets (Agaricus bisporus) are cultivated in beds, or so-called substrate mixtures, that can include anything from hay and crushed corncobs to chicken manure and used straw bedding from horses’ stables. That knowledge bothered me for many years. Repeatedly warned against waterlogging my mushrooms by giving them … Read more

You’ll read in some food books and magazines that you should roll it firmly on the counter. Others recommend microwaving it for a minute or so. These actions sound perfectly reasonable, but I have always wondered whether they really work. I had a chance to find out when my friend Jack, who loves to find … Read more

Ordinary plastic spray bottles are made to spray watery liquids, not oily ones. Water is thinner (less viscous) than oil and breaks up easily into a mist, but the paltry pressure from a trigger pump isn’t enough to break oil down into microscopic droplets, the way a pressurized aerosol can can. Cookware stores and catalogs … Read more

Wash them properly and don’t use them for unintended purposes. After being used to brush on an egg wash or melted butter, a pastry brush becomes gummy and rancid unless you wash it thoroughly before putting it away. Wet it with hot water and work up a lather by swishing it around on a cake … Read more

Believe it or not, a magnetic rack might actually keep your knives sharp longer. In fact, in one of those slick catalogs of expensive gadgets that no one needs, I even saw a magnetic housing for storing your razor, allegedly to keep the blade sharp between shaves. (How it would otherwise get dull between shaves … Read more

First, loosen up your wallet, high quality doesn’t come cheap. The ideal frying pan will distribute the burner’s heat uniformly over its surface, transfer it quickly to the food, and respond promptly to changes in heat settings. That boils down to two qualities: thickness and heat conductivity. Look for a thick pan made out of … Read more

Sticking is a two-way street. In order for sticking to occur, there must be both a stick-er and a stickee. At least one partner must be tacky. Quiz: Identify the sticky one in each of the following pairs: Glue and paper. Chewing gum and a shoe sole. A lollipop and a little boy. Very good. … Read more

Relax. Don’t sue. There was no metal in your vegetables. I’ll bet it was mainly the carrots that got charred, right? Here’s what probably happened. Frozen foods usually contain ice crystals. But as I pointed out earlier, solid ice doesn’t absorb microwaves nearly as well as liquid water does. The defrost setting on microwave ovens … Read more

Microwave energy is absorbed primarily by water in the food. The waterlogged canned peas and their surrounding liquid absorb microwaves at pretty much the same rate and will therefore get hot more or less equally. When the water begins to boil, the peas are at about the same temperature, whereupon you undoubtedly consider them to … Read more

The answer may strike you as disappointingly simple: The microwaved food may not have been as hot to begin with. Many factors, such as the type, quantity, and thickness of the food, affect how it will heat in a microwave oven. If, for example, the chosen on-and-off cycle of the magnetron isn’t exactly right for … Read more

Microwaves change the molecular structure of foods. The process is called “cooking.” All cooking methods cause chemical and molecular changes in our foods. A cooked egg certainly has a different chemical composition from a raw one. No method of cooking will destroy minerals. But heat will destroy vitamin C, for example, no matter how the … Read more

No and yes. No, it’s unlikely that anything serious will happen, but yes, you should be careful. Microwave-heated water that hasn’t yet come to a full, vigorous boil can indeed be a booby trap. Because microwave energy is absorbed only by the outer inch or so of the water in a cup, the resulting heat … Read more

In principle, the answer is simple: Containers whose molecules aren’t dipoles and will not absorb microwaves. Such molecules will not be jerked around by the microwaves and will not get hot. But in practice, the answer isn’t quite so simple. Surprisingly, in what many people perceive as our overregulated society, there appears to be no … Read more

An old, beat-up oven with a warped door may indeed let enough microwaves out through the cracks to be a hazard, but there is extremely little leakage from today’s carefully designed ovens. Moreover, the instant the door is opened, the magnetron shuts off and the microwaves disappear like the light when you turn off a … Read more

Light bounces off mirrors; microwaves bounce off metal. Radar is a kind of microwave that bounces off your speeding car and cooks your goose. If what you put in the oven reflects too many microwaves back instead of absorbing them, the magnetron tube can be damaged. There must always be something in the oven to … Read more

It’s hard to design a microwave oven in which the intensity of the microwaves is completely uniform throughout the entire volume of the box so that food in all locations will be subjected to the same heating power. Moreover, any food in the oven is sucking up microwaves and upsetting whatever uniformity there might otherwise … Read more

Before it can heat the food, a conventional gas or electric oven first has to heat some two to four cubic feet of air (“preheating the oven”), after which the hot air must transfer its heat energy into the food. These are very slow and very inefficient processes. A microwave oven, on the other hand, … Read more

Because it is. The magnetron cycles on and off to allow periods of time for the heat to distribute itself through the food. When you set the oven for a percentage of full “power,” what you’re adjusting isn’t the magnetron’s wattage; it can operate only at its full, rated power (but see below). What you’re … Read more

Unlike their electromagnetic cousins the X rays, which are of much higher frequency and energy, microwaves can’t penetrate food more than an inch or so; their energy is completely absorbed and turned into heat within that region. That’s one reason for the “cover and wait” injunction of recipes and “smart” ovens: It takes time for … Read more

Don’t try to find the answer to that question in food books. With only one exception, every book in my food library, including those devoted exclusively to microwave cooking, either evades the question entirely or gives the same misleading answer. Evading the issue only reinforces the less-than-helpful notion of a magic box. But promulgating a … Read more

There is so much anxiety among home cooks about microwave ovens that you’d think they were kitchen-sized nuclear reactors. The situation is not helped by some authors of food books, who seem not to know the difference between microwaves and radioactivity. Yes, they are both radiations, but so are the television radiations that bring us … Read more

With tongue firmly planted in cheek, the British essayist and critic Charles Lamb (1775–1834), in “A Dissertation on Roast Pig,” tells how humans first discovered cooking or, more precisely, roasting, after “for the first seventy thousand ages” eating their meat raw by “clawing or biting it from the living animal.” The story, purportedly discovered in … Read more

The U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, Title 27, Chapter 1, part 7, etc., etc., etc. says that “the terms ‘low alcohol’ or ‘reduced alcohol’ may be used only on malt beverages containing less than 2.5 percent alcohol by volume” and that nonalcoholic beer must contain less than 0.5 percent alcohol by volume. By volume? Yes, … Read more

It used to be that the federal government prohibited brewers from listing the percentage of alcohol on the labels of beers to discourage people from choosing their beverages based on alcohol content. But that’s not true anymore. In 1935, two years after the repeal of Prohibition, the Federal Alcohol Administration (FAA) Act prohibited the labeling … Read more

The usual evasive answer to this question is “one or two drinks a day.” But what is “a drink,” anyway? A bottle of beer? A glass of wine? A brimful, six-ounce martini? There are tall drinks and short drinks, stiff drinks and weak drinks. One man’s drink may look to the next guy like a … Read more

You’re not expected to sniff it for evidence of moldiness. That’s rare in this day and age. Moreover, when a small amount of the wine is poured for monsieur or madame’s approval, a couple of swirls and sniffs will tell all that one needs to know. If the wine smells and tastes fine, who cares … Read more

I asked the same question on a trip to Portugal and western Spain, where more than half of the world’s cork is grown, but I was unable to get a satisfactory answer. It was like asking a silkworm about polyester. Back home, I learned why many wineries are switching to plastic stoppers. Yes, they’re more … Read more

The most important thing in opening a bottle of Champagne is to accomplish the task with such aplomb that it will appear to your guests as if you do it every day. This is very difficult to pull off while wincing at the expectation of imminent disaster. So conquer your fears by practicing a couple … Read more

The bottle had undoubtedly been treated roughly some time earlier, without having been given enough time to recover. It must rest quietly on ice or in the refrigerator for at least an hour before being gently removed and opened. In contemporary American society, Champagne is not meant to be drunk anyway. It is meant to … Read more

If you can’t finish the whole bottle and you want to keep the leftovers gassy and sassy until the next pizza, just stopper it tightly and keep it cold. You knew that. But why? The objective is to keep all of the remaining carbon dioxide in the bottle, because it’s the carbon dioxide, bursting its … Read more

My first reaction was no, not if there isn’t a slow leak somewhere in the bottle’s seal. But after extensive research, which consisted of dialing the 800 Consumer Information number on a Coca-Cola label, I find that it is not only possible, it’s quite common. After prompting the nice woman who answered the phone to … Read more

Don’t laugh. That’s a good question. So good, in fact, that I thought of it myself when I learned that 15.2 billion gallons of carbonated soft drinks and 6.2 billion gallons of beer were consumed in 1999 in the United States. And what do you suppose happened to all the carbon dioxide in those beverages? … Read more

I don’t know what you’ve been drinking, but there are plenty of riskier beverages out there than Tang and Coke. I’d be concerned about this particular duo only if my stomach were made of soap scum or rust. Just because a chemical does something to one substance doesn’t mean it’ll do the same thing to … Read more

It’s a mistaken notion that all carbonated soft drinks are rich in the chemical element phosphorus (which almost everyone, it seems, wants to misspell as “phosphorous”). The only thing that all carbonated soft drinks have in common is carbonated water: carbon dioxide dissolved in water. Beyond that, they contain a wide variety of flavorings and … Read more

Microwave-heated water isn’t as hot as kettle-heated water, even though it may look as if it’s boiling. Water for tea must be boiling hot in order to extract all the color and flavor. Caffeine, for example, won’t dissolve in water that’s much cooler than 175°F. That’s why the teapot, or if you’re a bag-at-a-time brewer, … Read more

There is only one plant, Camellia sinensis and a couple of hybrids thereof, whose leaves can be steeped in hot water to make real tea. They may have different names, depending, among other things, on where they were grown. Some of those “tea” bags you may be offered, such as chamomile, for example, do not … Read more

The chemicals used to decaffeinate coffee are related to cleaning fluid, yes, but different. Like my Uncle Leon. In chemical families, as in human families, there are both similarities and idiosyncrasies. Caffeine itself, for example, is a member of the alkaloid family of powerful plant chemicals that includes such bad actors as nicotine, cocaine, morphine, … Read more

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

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