On browning.

So not that long ago, I got into searing - particularly the myth that searing seals in juices (which it doesn't). So why do we do it?

The answer? Browning.

Browning is, by definition, the act of turning something brown (doi). Now, in culinary terms, this is an overarching way to describe caramelization and the Maillard reaction. Organic molecules all have one element in common - carbon. And when compounds containing carbon are exposed to enough heat to break them down, the carbon reacts, turning black. Combined with everything else that's going on, this steadily darkens (or browns) the food until all the other elements burn away, leaving you with, well, carbon. Which is a fancy way of saying 'burnt'.

So what happens before we get to burnt? Let's look at caramelization first. We've heard the term, maybe even heard the phrase 'breaking down of sugars' bandied about. And said phrase is a pretty decent snapshot of what's going on - sugars, which are composed entirely of oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon, do in fact break down from their more complex forms (like sucrose and lactose) and recombine into smaller, less complicated sugars (like glucose, fructose, and galactose) that, when they reach the tongue, require a lot less effort to process and therefore taste sweeter to us.

But wait, that's not all! The process also creates all kinds of weird little mongrel molecules out of these three building blocks, organic acids and polymers that don't just taste sweet. They hit bitter and sour notes, creating a multidimensional flavor profile for us to appreciate.

Which brings us to the Maillard reaction, which is pretty much the same thing, only we're bringing proteins to the party. Amino acids have a shit-ton more elemental diversity than sugar itself, which means the chemical compounds formed with sulfur, nitrogen, potassium and more get infinitely more complicated and unique, leading to an insanely more complex and diverse flavor profile in the finished product.

So if browning is so amazing, why don't we do it all the time?

Well, first of all, browning involves an assload of heat and a giant pile of chemical reactions. As intense and interesting as the new flavors we create through the process, we're destroying just as many flavors as we're creating. Sometimes we want these flavors present in a dish - we want an avocado to taste like an avocado. Sometimes, in order to bring a food up to a temperature high enough to generate these reactions, we destroy the textural things we enjoy about them, like egg or celery.

Secondly, browning makes things... well, brown. Cooks and chefs the world around know the value of visual contrast, how the bright green crunch of a fresh scallion can make a dish pop. Chicken stock traditionally skips the browning process of the bones and mirepoix to maintain its light, delicate coloration. It's tough to make a plate look pretty if everything's the same color. Come to think of it, it's tough to make a dish taste complex if everything's a complicated brown muddle of flavor. Contrast is key, be it in flavor, appearance, or texture.

So there it is. A rough breakdown of browning and why we do and don't do it. Cheers, guys - I'll see you next time 'round.

On leftover fries.

We've all been there. Maybe we went to Five Guys and got the large. Maybe we ordered delivery and they were so floppy they wound up in the fridge. Regardless of the circumstance, you have a wadload of fries sitting in the fridge, staring at you from a greasy bag or a moist clamshell until you give up and chuck them.

It doesn't have to be this way. Fries can be given a new life. All we have to do is fry them again.

You heard me. And of course, you don't have a deep fryer just lying around your house. And even if you did, you definitely wouldn't want to drop already-seasoned food back into it. No, we must look to the frying pan for this.

To make the potatoey bits more manageable in a pan, I highly recommend cutting them down into cubes before tossing them into a frying pan with a healthy dose of high-smoke point oil. Just fry them off, stirring occasionally (I like to use the cheffy panfloop), until they reach your desired level of crispness.

And what do you do with these crispy, nutritionally vacant bits?

Garnish soup. Like croutons, these hyper-crisp nubbins of potato will hold their own in moisture-rich environments. Not for long, of course - if you linger over your soup, add them in stages as you work your way down.

Serve alongside a braise. I can't tell you how often I braise chicken, usually with a big tough leafy green in the same pan. Call me crazy, but I like dishes that are ready whenever the fuck you feel like eating it. Of course, a good dinner needs balance in all things, and nothing in a braise comes out anything other than crazy soft. Counterbalance that with a little refried fries action and take it to the next level.

Make hash. While the potatoes are still in the pan, dig out a couple of wells in them, crack eggs in, sprinkle some bacon or cheese or what the what you have lying around on top, and drop it in the oven until the eggs are done to your liking. Voila, you have a quick and easy breakfast. And if you like your yolks runny, you're going to love them gooing all over crunchy chunks of tuber.

The sky's the limit, really. They make for a handy side or clever garnish, and they give you a quick and easy option when you need something on the rail. So don't throw out those leftover fries - put them to work.

Ode to Steak.

Written a long time ago. Still relevant today.

Ode to Steak

I ate a steak today. It was delicious.
Lusty lines of fat embraced the meat;
Age had made it tender, ripe, ambitious,
Ready - no, salacious for the heat.
A dash of salt, a coat of pepper ground,
and oh! What sacred scent I did endure.
Scent led to taste, and what a taste profound -
Say what you will, that moment's joy was pure.

So let you vaunted versists squawk your lines,
Your love and loss, your mountain's majesties.
Love fades to bore, loss whimpers to a whine,
and mountains never mattered much to me.
Thrust your sweaty loins until you ache,
I'll keep my simple pleasures. Give me steak.

On the searing myth.

We've all heard it. "Searing meat seals in the juices." As I grew up and while I learned to cook, I heard it time and time again, repeated from the mouths of hallowed chefs and local cooks alike. It's one of those tenets you hear and just accept, because let's face it, it sounds like it makes sense.

But just because something makes sense doesn't mean it's true. The idea was originally put forth by Justus von Liebig in his book Researches on the Chemistry of Food back in the 1850s, and it was immediately embraced by the cooking world, including the legendary Auguste Escoffier (the mack daddy of modern professional cooking - more on that history lesson at some point, I'm sure). And reinforced by so many voices, the public came to accept it as culinary fact.

So why did we buy it in the first place? As I said, it makes sense. We all hear about cauterization, about how slapping hot iron to a wound stops bleeding in a pinch. But we forget that in times like these, we're not so much sealing a surface as we are melting pipes shut. Effective, yes, but definitely a completely different ballgame from cookery.

The fact is, food is (hopefully) biological material, and biological material is made of cells. Any time you rupture those cell walls, be it with blade or fire, you're going to create moisture loss, as evidenced by Alton's episode on culinary mythery. After all, if searing really did seal in the juices, why would meat in the pan keep sizzling once a crust had formed if the cut wasn't still releasing moisture?

Okay, okay. So if searing meat not only doesn't seal in juices, but actually accelerates moisture loss, why do we do it, and why do we do it as the first step? The answer is simple: the Maillard reaction. Which, of course, is very far from simple, but just saying those three words is simple. Shut up.

Applying an assload of heat to food generates this magical physical and chemical reaction that creates a wide range of flavors and textures in the process (more on the Maillard reaction another day) that is extremely desirable in food. Since the compounds created are water-soluble, the process is best executed with a minimum of moisture involved. And since, as we've stated, cell damage generates moisture loss, the driest your hunk of meat will ever be is going to be at the very start of the cooking. You following me here? Because I'm still a little nap-brained and I'm not sure I'm making complete sense.

Speaking of, I should stop talking before I really go into depth about caramelization and the Maillard reaction. Let's post up here and let this sink in:

Searing meat does not seal in the juices.

But keep doing it anyway.

On garlic powder vs. granulated garlic.

I mean, seriously, what's the difference?

Ever since Alton Brown graced on it on his episode on dips (Dip Madness, S6E8), I've used granulated garlic almost exclusively. I could never really put my finger on why - maybe it's because I perceived the flavor to be more garlicky, maybe it was just easier to distribute via my usual pinch-and-sprinkle method.

So I decided to do some research on my own today. I've delved into my textbooks and references, Googled the shit out of some shit, and come up with...

...almost nothing. Just a bunch of vague assumptions, conversion charts, and largely unsubstantiated claims. So what did I find?

1) Garlic powder tends to come from dehydrated garlic flakes, while granulated garlic tends to come from freeze-dried slices of garlic.

Garlic's flavor, like all members of the Allium family, comes from pungent sulfuric compounds (side note: that's why chopping onions makes you cry; the sulfur is released into the air, and when it comes in contact with moisture, it's actually making sulfuric acid in your goddamn eye), and all such compounds tend to be on the volatile side of things.

Now, dehydration tends to be a hot technique, encouraging evaporation through heat (usually around 150F), whereas freeze-drying uses air pressure to draw out moisture through sublimation. We talked about heat and molecular agitation earlier, so which method do you think would better preserve garlic's flavor?

2) Garlic powder is pulverized into a dust, while granulated garlic is milled to a desired grind.

Again, this comes down to preserving the flavor compounds. Granted, neither technique is particularly delicate with the product, but somehow, I feel like smashing the fuck out of something repeatedly is just a little gentler than running it through a set of burrs once or twice. Call me crazy.

Also, a coarser grind means the surface area to volume ratio for granulated garlic is considerably lower. This means each granule has an undisturbed nubbin of garlicky goodness within, while in powder form, there's next to nothing left of the original fatleaf. And since, like any dried herb or spice, the flavor comes out with rehydration, having more garlic at the core should, logically, lead to a fuller, more comparable garlic flavor. (On the rehydration tip, remember that time and moisture works to your benefit. So if you like garlic powder on your pizza, better to hit the entire pizza at the getgo rather than wait to flavor each slice.)

3) Garlic powder has a much higher chance of containing an anticaking agent than granulated garlic.

A minor concern, of course, since anticaking agents are widely known to be harmless. Still, I like to operate with as few ancillary ingredients as possible, so if I can skip the silicon dioxide (or calcium silicate or sodium aluminosilicate or whatever the fuck), I'd prefer to.

So there you have it, guys. If I had the time to infiltrate McCormick's and get to the nitty gritty of things, I might have been able to get more details to you. But as it stands, I'm feeling pretty confident in my continued decision to use granulated garlic over garlic powder. If anyone's got any further information on the subject, I'd love to hear it.

Until next time!

On recipes.

Periodically (for the first few months of this blog, at least), I'll repost blogs from my other blog that pertained to food. Partially because they're relevant to this blog as well, but mostly because I'm too lazy to rephrase material.

I was prompted today to post a recipe. Not too surprising of a prompt, of course; those of you that know me (and I'm going to assume that's all three of you that are here) know I cook a great deal. But as I sat down to think about what my greatest dish and the story behind it was, I hit a rather familiar roadblock. Barring baking, I don't generally follow recipes, much less write my own.

That's not to say that recipes don't have their purpose. If I'm learning a new dish, I'll make it once to spec to understand what the author wanted it to taste like, then adapt it accordingly to my tastes. But after a while, you start to realize that most recipes are just one or two techniques with variances on ingredients. Once you learn how to make a proper pot roast, braising short ribs in coffee isn't much of a jump. If you learned how to make a beschamel for your baked mac and cheese, then you know how to build a turkey gravy.

To understand these techniques, it's important to understand why you're doing what you're doing. Are you searing that pork chop because that's how you seal in juices, or because the Maillard reaction generates complexity of flavor? Is that water bath you're putting your cheesecake in to keep the top from cracking or for insulation? When you learn these things, you learn to adapt. You learn to thicken your chowders with leftover mashed potatoes when you don't have the flour to build a roux, because starch is starch. You learn to use white vinegar in your guacamole when someone has a citrus allergy because acid is what keeps the avocados from oxidizing.

And I say this to you because it's important to know how to adapt. When you know why the rules and instructions are in place, you understand what's important and what's not. And you stop worrying when you miss your turn, because you can just take the next one and circle around. You stop stressing out when you lose a washer because a bread clip will do just fine. You waltz to Everybody Hurts because it's in 3/4.

Knowledge is power because knowledge keeps you from freaking the fuck out. And not freaking the fuck out is the greatest power of all.

On comfort food.

I talk about tacos a lot. My affection for them is well-known - once, on a family vacation, I tried to eat fifty of them in a week (I was balked by food poisoning). I owned and operated a taco shop. I claim them to be one of my favorite foods. When asked what kind of taco I'm talking about when I say I love tacos, my response is usually 'I love them all.'

And while that is true, when I say that tacos are my favorite comfort food, I'm talking about a very specific kind of taco. I'm talking about the hardshells, the ground beef tacos. The ones you find in kits at the grocery store in the Ethnic Foods aisle. Unexciting, perhaps, but comfort food isn't meant to excite.

For a food to be a comfort food, it has to be more than about the food itself. Comfort is not found solely in an object - it is swaddled in meaning, in memory. Like a brand of cigarette you used to smoke or the road the house you grew up in is on. They might just be a cardboard box or a stretch of pavement to some, but to you, it's something special. It's a memory, a feeling.

And it's that feeling that gives us comfort. The act of putting two shells on the plate, two fingertips holding them upright. Spooning just the right amount of filling in. The cheese, the salsa. The chopped tomato, the leafy green. Years of studying the mechanics of the taco, learning what holds which ingredients in place. How much pressure at what angle makes the fillings squeeze out the other end.

That first bite. Teeth snapping through the shell quickly, too quickly to create fault lines throughout the remainder of the tortilla. The melding of textures between your teeth, the balance of flavor on your tongue. Measuring your bites to ensure even filling distribution as you work your way along. Knowing at the end of your second taco that you know exactly how many bites each taco afterwards will take.

This is what comfort is. It's familiarity. Ritual. In the face of uncertainty, a vast, shadowy future, it gives us shelter and strength. It is found in religion, in exercise, in what you do when you get home from work. Have respect for it when you see it in others. And most of all, have respect for it when you see it in yourself.

On thermal travel mugs.

So the cafe I work at got these neat stainless steel travel mugs in, and true to form, all us staffers got to take one home. And in the middle of a cold snap a month or two ago, one of my coworkers was telling me how she left her hot coffee out in her Jeep all bloody day, and when she got back, it was still warm!

Amazing! "But I don't get it," she said. "It's steel, and doesn't metal transfer heat pretty quickly?"

Well, that's really only half the story. First off, not all metal transfers heat quickly, but that's a tale for another time. The important part of this equation is that the travel mugs are vacuum-insulated. In fact, most thermal products nowadays are. And the reason why is pretty simple - because vacuums are amongst the best insulations available to us.

Heat is, after all, the agitation of molecules. Picture a bouncy castle with a kid with four cookies and a hot chocolate railing around in it. That kid is going nuts, bouncing off the walls, screaming her lungs out, doing what kids do. She's got a lot of kinetic energy to burn. Now picture the same kid two hours later, passed the fuck out in the middle of the thing or wherever the fuck she landed. She's burned off all her energy, and has none left to do anything but sleep.

This is the difference between a molecule that is hot versus one that's cold. It's a matter of energy. Now, how many kids on a sugar rush do you think you can fit in that bouncy castle? How many will fit if they're all totally zonked out? Suddenly the idea that things expand and contract when they're hot or cold makes sense, no? Things take up less room when they are still.

But I digress. The fact is, thermal energy, like kinetic energy, is transferred through impact. When molecules smash into each other, they transfer the energy of the impact into the next molecule until an equilibrium is established. This is why if you preheat a container before you put a hot liquid in it, it'll keep said liquid hotter longer because the average between those two temperatures is significantly higher than if you had started with a cold container.

Which brings me to the value of the vacuum-insulated container. A cross-section of one of our steel travel mugs would reveal two thin layers of steel separated by an empty space, which, before you so callously cleft the doohickey in twain, contained absolutely nothing. No air, no liquid, nothing.

Think about that. Nothing. In the absence of any molecules to transfer energy to, the tiny bouncy castle kids that make up your double tall bound back from the walls with absolutely zero loss in kinetic energy, meaning your tasty beverage remains just as hot. Is it perfect? No. Obviously, they're still hitting the air at the unsealed top of the mug, so heat is bleeding out that way. And no manmade vacuum is flawless; there's always going to be a teensy amount of air or particulate matter bouncing around in there. But all the same, vacuums make for fantastic insulation because there's simply nothing there to agitate.

Of course, nature abhors a vacuum. Which means when you toss that fucker in the dishwasher or run it over with your car or chuck it at a brick wall because the Eagles lost again, you run the risk of cracking the hull. And when that happens, air rushes in, completely nullifying the mug's insulating properties. No longer do you have a magical heat-maintaining device; you just have a chunk of metal that holds stuff for you. It's also why we don't insulate shit like our walls with vacuums - try to nail one painting into the wall, and you're boned.

So there you go. This is why your fancy thermoses and travel mugs keep hot things hot and cold things cold - it's all about molecular energy transfer. It's also why if you need to keep anything at a stable temperature - soup, hollandaise, melted chocolate - look to your travel mugs.

Cheers, kids. See you next time.

An introduction.

Hi.

I'm Raoul. Better known on the internet as Warmonger Smurf (Smurf for short). And I love food. I learned how to cook watching Alton Brown. I read Harold McGee and Michael Pollan. I've worked around food my whole adult life, and I've grown to love every last bit of it. How it looks, how it smells. The joy to be found in the simple act of eating.

It bums me out to think that when a lot of people think of food, all they see is an ingredient list and some step-by-step directions. Food's more than recipes and reviews; it encompasses so much more about our lives than we give it credit for. It's science and art, it's comfort and exploration. It's techniques and forms, rules and philosophy. It takes precision and interpretation in equal measure. It's a reflection of cultures worldwide, an insight on what people believe and how they live. Eating's one of two human activities that use all five senses, that we all have in common across the globe.

I won't pretend to be an expert on any of this. I'm just a guy who cooks, some dude who talks about food a little more often than the average person. You won't find many recipes or destinations here - I'd rather talk about what goes into cooking, why we do the things we do when we're making it. I'd rather talk about what it means to us, as individuals, as friends, as families and communities.

So stay a while, and listen. Y'know, if that kind of thing appeals to you. I'll be here.