Harold McGee - Keys to Good Cooking: A Guide to Making the Best of Foods and Recipes

Also by Harold McGee

On Food and Cooking

The Curious Cook

Copyright 2010 Harold McGee

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisheror in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agencyis an infringement of the copyright law.

Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

McGee, Harold
Keys to good cooking / Harold McGee.

eISBN: 978-0-385-67130-9

1. Cookery. I. Title.

TX651.M363 2010 641.5 C2010-902531-8

Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,
a division of Random House of Canada Limited

Visit Random House of Canada Limiteds website: www.randomhouse.ca

v3.1

To Florence and John

C ooking can be one of the most satisfying things we do in life. Its a chance to make things with our own hands, nourish and give pleasure to people we care about, and choose exactly what we eat and make part of ourselves. Its also a way to explore the astounding creativity of the natural world and thousands of years of human culture, to taste foods and traditions from all over the planet at our own table. This endlessly rewarding quality is what has kept me delving into cooking for more than thirty years.

Cooking is especially rewarding when it goes well! Its true, as were frequently reminded, that the only way to become a good cook is to cook, and cook, and cook some more. But many of us dont manage to cook that frequently, and frequent cooking can also be cooking by rote, habitual and mediocre. The surest way to cook with pleasure and successwhether youre a beginner, a weekend gourmand, or an accomplished chefis to cook with understanding.

This book is designed to help you cook better by explaining what foods are, how cooking changes them, which methods work best, and why.

K eys to Good Cooking is not a cookbook. Recipes we have in abundance, in print and on the Web, from across the globe and across the centuries, from professionals and celebrities, families and friends. Instead, this book is a guide to help you navigate through the ever-expanding universe of recipes and arrive at the promised land of a satisfying dish.

Its easy to get lost along the way. Some recipes give reliably good results, but many dont. Some are sketchy and leave us guessing how exactly to proceed. Others are intimidatingly long and detailed. Different recipes for the same dish may give contradictory directions and explanations. Some place faithfulness to tradition above realistic handling of todays ingredients. And many perpetuate old misconceptions and flawed methods.

Even good recipes are no guarantee of success. At best theyre an incomplete description of a procedure that has worked for the recipe writer. Whenever we cook from a recipe, we have to interpret and adapt it for our kitchen, our ingredients, and our experience. And the process of interpretation and adaptation is just as important to success as the recipe itself. A good recipe can be badly made.

Happily, its also true that we can redeem a flawed recipe by seeing its flaws and correcting them as we adapt it.

Keys to Good Cooking is meant to be a constructively critical companion to your recipe collection, and a guide to the kitchen, gadgets, ingredients, and techniques with which you turn recipes into foods. Its a concise summary of our current understanding of food preparation. It provides simple statements of fact and advice, along with brief explanations that will help you understand why, and apply that insight whenever you cook. It will help you evaluate recipes, recognize likely flaws or problems, and make adjustments and corrections as you go. And I hope it will help you put aside recipes, improvise and experiment, and come up with your own ways of doing things.

T he first six chapters of this book describe the range of tools and pantry ingredients available to the home cook, how heat and basic cooking methods work, and the essentials of kitchen safety. These subjects arent likely to be at the top of your need-to-know list, and you may figure you already know what you need.

But because we usually equip our kitchens and pantries piecemeal, and only pay attention in emergencies to how the oven works or doesnt, it can be a real eye-opener to pause and take a closer look at these things. Once you think about how heat actually flows into and out of our foods as we cook, youll understand why standard stew recipes often dry out the meat, why a medium-hot oven can scorch baked goods, and what you can do to make sure you dont have those problems again. And did you know that thorough cooking not only cant kill some tough forms of bacteria that sicken us, it actually awakens them into rapid growth? Watch those leftovers! The most important kitchen facts are often the least obvious.

So I suggest reviewing these early chapters every once in a while to get better acquainted with foods and appliances and cooking methods, no matter how familiar they seem. And take the time to read through , Cooking Safely. Tens of thousands of Americans are made ill by food every day, many of them due to unnecessary mistakes made by cooks who could and should know better.

The remaining chapters are organized by ingredients and kinds of preparations. Read the introductory sections to find out how to recognize and handle good ingredients. Then, when youre cooking a particular dish, go to the paragraph or two devoted to that kind of preparation. Review the facts and the various possibilities before you start cooking, to help you choose a recipe or make adjustments to the one youve chosen, and just to get organized. If a problem or question arises as you go, if a step needs clarification, check again.

To keep this book a manageable size, it covers cooking basics, not advanced techniques or fine points. And because a cook in the kitchen needs to get back to cooking pronto, Ive tried to make the information as quickly accessible as possible. Ive kept statements brief and to the point, repeated them when necessary to save the trouble of hunting down cross-references, and highlighted key words to make them easy to spot on the page.

Key subjects and important facts to keep in mind are indicated in boldface.

Directions and important actions are indicated in italics.

H eres an example of how I hope youll use this book. Lets say Thanksgiving is coming up, you havent roasted a turkey since last Thanksgiving, and youve seen a recipe for brining the turkey to keep it moist. You might start by looking at the introduction to cooking meat on :

No matter what you read in recipes or hear pronounced by people who should know, keep these simple truths in mind: