H - Heat

The history of heat goes way back to the beginning of time. All how-we-got-here debates aside, the sun has been a huge source of heat ever since I can remember. But how did humans first create heat or fire? If I recall correctly, man started rubbing two sticks together, producing friction which causes heat and eventually fire. Then a woman told the man to get inside and use the new stove they bought at Christmas.

Once man figured out he could produce fire, he started getting creative with his cooking. He'd cook meat over charcoal. He'd cook on his carburator. He would even burn ants with a magnifying glass. All valid ways of cooking mind you.

Then man invented the microwave and T.V. dinners. This began a dark ugly era of cooking. Man found he could cook food faster and dryer. Leftover pizza was given a new life. Suddenly, everything that could fit in a microwave was cooked in a microwave.

We are now in a time where all methods of cooking - even solar cooking, are available. So what's the best type of cooking? That depends on the food, the need, and the speed. First, we have to look at the types of heat. All heat is not the same.

There are three main types of heat sources; radiation, conduction, and convection. Radiation is energy that travels in waves. Ovens, flames, microwaves, heck even lightbulbs produce heat via radiation. Conduction is when heat moves from something that is hot to something that is cold. Slap a raw egg on a skillet - you get conduction. Convection is heat through friction. Friction from moving air or boiling water are both examples of convection.

Broiling and grilling have already been covered in this blog and they are both perfect examples of cooking with radiation. So is using a microwave but I'd rather not encourage the use of the magic box.

Most other types of cooking combine convection and conduction. For the most part, conduction heats the cooking medium like water or oil, and convection is the heated medium acting upon the food. There's submersion cooking with water or oil that's common in boiling, frying, simmering, poaching, and stewing. Then contact cooking like searing, sauteing, and pan-frying where oil is commonly used to increase the surface area between the pan and the food.

If you haven't noticed, there are a lot of styles of cooking. 101 ways to skin a cat and just as many to cook an egg.

We're not finished. I can sear a piece of fish for three minutes with my oven on a heat setting of eight. What if you've got a gas stove and I've got electric? Don't forget that not all pans are make of the same material and therefore distribute heat differently. Therefore, I give you this important tip - if you follow a recipe and it fails, don't be surprised. Take notes so the next time you try that recipe, you'll know to raise or lower a cooking time or increase a heat setting.

Thinking back on all my years of bad cooking, I realize that I didn't know how to apply the right type of heat to the right type of food. My recommendation, and what I'm trying myself, is concentrating on one style of cooking for a while until it's not a scary subject anymore. I'm not ready for blanching but I've got a good handle on broiling and grilling.

Iron Chefs can create masterpieces from secret ingredients because they know two key pieces of information. They know how to cook using any style of cooking and they know when to use those styles. There might be other styles of cooking, but these are foundational. I figure if you can blanch vegetables, you can do anything.

A second blog - lab time.

http://fooddegreelab.blogspot.com

I'll post to it more regularly. In essence, it's:
applied cooking theory
OR
what I learned while I messed up that day's meal and how I tried to fix it
OR
one man and a pan

NOTE: General Observation

I've noticed that my kitchen is always short one or two key ingredients for anything I want to make. My wife, bless her heart, has added a refridgerator notepad specifically so she can pick up anything I write down.

I'd love to see some comments to this post about standard kitchen foodstuff (tomato's always on hand, etc.) that YOU keep stocked.

G - Grilling

G is for grilling, that's good enough for me.

I almost went with garlic. An old myth says people should wear cloves of garlic around their necks to keep the vampires away. I think the vampires started that one. I mean, who wouldn't want fresh garlic with their next meal. Either way, I'm all for garlic jewerly.

Back to this grilling idea. I'm not here to debate charcoal versus gas. I'm here to discuss grilling and how grilling can make any meal better.

You might like to grill tuna steaks, t-bone, chicken breasts, bananas, and bologna, ok, maybe not bologna but you can grill just about anything. My personal favorite is bratwurst.

Let me take you on the narrow windy journey that is grilling bratwurst. Bratwurst comes in as many colors as Crayola crayons, mostly dependent on the filling and spices. I spent a short time in Germany and found brat's could be the size of small dogs or pencils depending on the city. Regional food in the best sence of the term.

Grilling brat's is a journey each person must take. My friend, Ben, goes with direct heat until the brat looks like a burned rodent - and that's how he likes it. It's a little too much gnawing for my taste. I have cooked a few over direct heat but only because I was pressed for time. It can be done without a leather exterior forming around the brat's core, but it's not style that's fit for everyone.

I'm a slow cooker when it comes to my Johnsonville's. Slow cooking over indirect heat. This style of grilling results in the juiciest brat's you've ever had - only if you can tell when it's done. You see, slow cooking a brat is a lot like cooking a salmon. Pretty much the same color when it's done as when it's raw. [whispers] My time gauge is a beer. If I can sit and relax with something smooth like a Corona, I know that when the beer is done, so are the brat's. Either grilling method you use, remember to flip the brat's every few minutes.

I want to mention indoor grilling. No, I'm not talking a George Foreman grill. I do have one and I do like it, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking a stovetop and a frying pan.

Let's be honest, not all foods need thrown on the grill. Many foods, like a ham and cheese sandwich, however, could definitely used a bit of grilling. For many years, I ate ham and cheese sammys. The routine was usually 1) toast the bread, 2) toss on ham and cheese 3) heat in microwave. Simple and quick. But what about presentation and taste? This isn't food fit for a microwave, it's food meant for a grill. If you doubt that, look at all the trendy "california style" restaurants that serve hot ham and cheese for six bucks. How can they do it? Easy, they grill their sandwiches for even heating with a nice bit of bread crunch.

Grilling a sandwich is easy. You can either grill just the bread or use my style; make your sandwich then turn on the stovetop and get out your pan. Butter up the top of the sandwich bread, Toss in the sandwich and let it grill, butter-side down. After a little time, butter the side that's on the top of the sandwich and then flip it over. When you are done, you'll have a nicely grilled sandwich that's heated throughout with perfectly melted cheese and a nice toasty texture.

You don't have to grill your sandwichs. You don't have to put parsley on the side of your meals. You don't have to make a pretty presentation. But why not take those few extra steps and few extra moments to present a meal that's plated for a king? Sometimes the $30 per plate restaurant and the $10 per plate restaurant are only separated by those few extra touches. Why not present those at home?

F -Fats, Fresh F&V, French Words

I was going to have a lot of F-words for today. I had big cooking plans for this past weekend. Lots of time to use F-words. As luck would have it, I only had one chance; Saturday morning breakfast. One chance and I came up with three.

Fats, Fresh Fruits and Veggies, and French Words.
Let's talk fats and get this subject out of the way. Butter, buttery spreads, margarine, and butter spreads are all different. I don't care if the buttery spread says it can be used for cooking, it's not the same as butter. Different smoke points, different contents, different results, and differences in how your crepes turn out. Crepes - is that a French word? My point is this - if it calls for butter, USE BUTTER. Don't substitute on key ingredients, especially if you're cooking a dish for the first time. There are too many unanswered questions when a dish is botched and there's no excuse to blame a faulty ingredient.

And speaking of key ingredients, for the sake of all that is good in this world, can we PLEASE use fresh fruits and vegetables? Go to your local farmer's market or road-side stand and get fresh tomatos, peaches, beans, lettuce, carrots, apples, peppers, SQUASH, MELLONS, IT'S ALL GOOD! [takes deep breath] And it's cheaper. My local grocery store sells jalapeno peppers for $3.00 for a very small handfull of the green goodies. My local farmer's market sells about 12 peppers for $1.00. If you'd rather buy for convenience, go right ahead. And when you spend $15 for pickling peppers to my $2.00, know that convenience runs around thirteen bucks.

Remember when I said crepes? French cooking terms are easily found via search engines. That's the good news. Bad news is many french glossaries leave you with a la carte, a la mode, and a la-la-boom-de-a. Great education for reading a menu but it's not helpful when you must create a mirepoix. And with that, I want to discuss the single most important French term; mise en place. Mise en place (MEEZ ahn plahs) refers to having all ingredients necessary for a dish prepared and ready to combine up to the point of cooking. Mise en place is simply dicing/slicing/prepping/chopping/grading/measuring all ingredients ahead of time. This means when it's time to add chopped carrots at a crucial time, you aren't stuck holding a pan off the heat with one hand and whacking at a carrot with the other. I've found this method has saved me from starting a meal without all the required ingredients.

All this leads up to one thing - my attempt at the Saturday morning breakfast. The main dish - Fresh fruit fixed in Crepes using Fat. It started out great, mono-e-kitchen. Then whooooooooooosh, my plan goes out the window. We were out of bananas and butter was no where to be found. So I improvised. We did have peaches and a "buttery spread." At this point, I'll admit I should have grabbed my car keys and gone for some butter. Instead, I decided to use the "buttery spread." Oh, it worked well enough but I'm still stuck wondering "how much better could it have been?" Anyway, using AB's crepe recipe, I eventually found myself over the stove with a 1-ounce cup of crepe-batter and a hot pan. By the time it was all over, I was left with 14 good crepes, 2 crepes that suffered from poor flipping, 1 burned crepe, and 1 burned finger. Then it was on to the crepe filling. Ricotto cheese whipped with powdered sugar and then folded in some chopped peaches. And FoodDude said "it is good."

Finally, I found crepes were great for chinese leftovers. I think I'll keep crepes on hand as often as tortillas and loaves of bread.

The blog entry on eggs flowed like a runny yolk. This entry is much like my first attempt at crepes - affective with room for improvement. I'm off to get a stick of butter.

Note: Grilling Times

Both assume "hot" coals.

Hamburger - 4 minutes per side.

Marinated Chicken Breast (boneless) - 8 minutes per side. First 8 - over coals with skin side down. Second 8 - just off the coals with the grill cover closed.

I'll probably keep this one updated with new listings.