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Yep, it’s that time – time for another episode!

This week, as he mentions below, Paul is rigorously testing Jamie Oliver’s cookbook-writing skills, though the medium of a guy called Steve, and a whole lot of pasta dough.

Watch it now!

If you like the episode, or any episode, if you fancied telling your friends/your social networking site of choice/the world about it we’d be really, really grateful. You can embed any of our episodes using the third button from the right on the Flash player. As I’ve mentioned before, our publicity budget wouldn’t buy a large pizza and fries, let alone a marketing campaign…

We love celebrity chefs here at Kamikaze Cookery. No, really, we do. I’m a particular fan of Nigella Lawson, although not, admittedly, for any reason relating to her food. All of us, to a greater or lesser extent, have a (sometimes grudging) respect for Heston Blumental. Naturally, Hugh is the only one crazy enough to have actually tried to cook one of his recipes. (I believe it took seventeen hours start to finish. Maybe he’ll tell you about it some time.)

And therein lies the rub. Heston tells you to take twenty kilos of tomatoes and peel them. This is easy for him. He’s got a laboratory and a team of highly trained staff to do the peeling for him, so he can swan in at the last minute, do something magical with an ultrasound gun, and take all the credit. An average person, we feel, would have given up on about tomato #3 and sent out for pizza instead.

It might be easier if the books told you how to peel tomatoes (soak them in hot water so that the skins swell, then they’re much easier to take off), but they don’t do that, either. You’re supposed to guess.

And then there’s the language used in the recipes themselves. What does it mean when it tells you to sweat the carrots? Isn’t `sweat’ an intransitive verb? Why doesn’t anybody tell us this stuff?

(I have a mental image now of a novice cook reading a book and then trying to force carrots out through his own pores. It’s not pretty.)

Most celebrity chefs started off as chefs. They’ve had years of training and they’ve forgotten what it’s like to walk into a kitchen and wonder which one of these things is the fishknife, or which end of the peeler you hold, or whether it’s a five-second or a ten-second rule for dropping things on the floor. Since cooking is easy for them, it must be easy for us, so they don’t bother to explain things.

I had the same problems with my maths lecturers at university, but that’s a subject for a whole different blog.

And everyone secretly knows this. We buy these glossy recipe books, ooh and aah over the luscious pictures for a few minutes, and then display them proudly on our bookshelves unused. They’re like that copy of A Brief history of Time or the complete works of Shakespeare: certificates displaying membership of the petit-bourgeoisie, not practical documents.

At Kamikaze Cookery, we like to cook stuff. We feel that recipe books are no help.

Such a bold assertion desires proof! Fortunately, we have a science-based cookery show. Now we have an observational hypothesis and it’s time to test it.

In this week’s episode, surprising almost exactly no one, we take on Jamie Oliver. As I discussed recently, Jamie’s back in the news of late, and while he’s being slightly cooler than he used to be, he’s still an arrogant little mockney prat. It has to be said, though, that he makes some good food and he wants to share it with the nation’s children. A noble goal, perhaps, but I’m fairly sure there are better ways to go about it than a reality television show.

We took a normal person, the sort who might buy one of these sleb-chef cookbooks or get one as a present from a well-meaning relative, and set out to discover whether it was possible to extract the food from the equation while leaving behind the rampaging irritance that Jamie smears over everything he does.

Along the way we read anecdotes about Jamie’s “housekeeper”, discovered interesting alternate spellings of simple words, and learned about the science behind pasta dough, which we cover in the episode. We’ve got more about dough coming up in a later video, when we cover a different celebrity chef. We found out which ingredients you can buy in a shop and which ones you have to travel to Italy for. We improvised kitchen implements and learned why pasta comes in packets.

And at the end, we sat down and had dinner, and after all that, it was quite nice. Isn’t that the point?

I’ve made more than a few mentions of some other wonderful food blogs out there, but I’ve failed to actually give a list at any point.

So, for those of you who might be interested in reading more than just KKC (shame on you!) here are a few favourites.

After a bit of writing, I came to the conclusion that if I was to write all my favourite food blogs up, it’d be the Longest Blog Post Evar. So, here’s the first list, focussing on Molecular Gastronomy-ish blogs.

Khymos

Fantastic, in-depth, well-researched articles on a variety of fascinating topics, from new ideas in cherry jam (and the science therof to detailed overviews of the science of the senses . Martin Lersch, who runs Khymos, is a seriously trained scientist and also a frankly brilliant cook – his foamed strawberries with coriander , for example, is world-class. And he also provides some stunning resources, from the enormous free hydrocolloid cookbook (which I’m amazed hasn’t been published yet – for the record, if you’re reading this, Martin, I’d cheerfully pay for a hardcover copy) to the ongoing They Go Really Well Together contest. Must-read.

Ideas In Food

OK, if you want seriously hardcore cutting-edge molecular gastronomy, this is the place to go. Aki and Alex, pro chefs both, make people like me look like we’re just microwaving readymeals. Currently, they’re hugely into liquid nitrogen (if you hear me ranting about cryo-cooking, that’s because of posts like this one ), food glues (less scary than they sound – see this post about fruit glues and sous-vide , and dessication (woo! powdered pumpkin! ), amongst other things. They don’t always go as much into detail on the techniques they’re using as I’d like, but still, they’re really inspirational.

Curious Cook

Harold McGee blogs, man! He blogs! The guy who wrote the Bible (aka “On Food And Cooking”) has a blog! And it’s really, really useful and informative, too. Recently he’s run tests on cooking pans , wierd flavours in white pepper (with hardcore aromatic info), and the post that made me aware of his blog in the first place, on clarifying stocks with gelatin (which was one of those “Oh, my god, you can do WHAT?” moments. Again, just vital.

Egullet

Ok, this isn’t a blog. It’s a forum. And it isn’t specialised in molecular gastronomy, either – but nonetheless, with apologies to all the people above, this is probably the single biggest resource for molecular gastronomy madness on the Internet. The posters here have tried EVERYTHING – the thread on sous-vide cooking is 71 pages long, for example. (Other cookery forums I’ve visited have barely gotten past “oh, that’s the thing where you cook in a plastic bag, right?”) Want to know about installing a wok burner so large it’ll make your wok glow red? They’ve done it, they’ve tested it, and they’ve got the advice you need.

This post is rather later than it should have been because I got distracted reading a new thread on methocel (and how you can use it to make hot icecream, amongst other things ). And so on.

Anyone got any I’ve missed?

Alex talked about pretentious restaurants the other day, and last night, I had the opposite experience.

Out of work at ten pm, and went to meet the girlfriend, who was still slaving over a hot palimpsest in the Archaeology Department, or whatever it is she does in there. Stopped off for a pint. Or two. And a couple of whiskies. Forgot it was Sunday and all the restaurants close early. The only place open was a take-away pizza place that had an adjoining Italian bistro. I’ve had their pizzas before when it’s  am and I’m drunk, but I was more than a little dubious about using them for a sit-down meal.

I needn’t have worried. My pizza con funghi e pollo had deliciously light, fluffy dough, presumably made fresh that day, and the chicken had come off a real bird, probably one that had actually seen a field at some point. Jehane’s pasta came with salmon that had been oak-smoked over whisky-barrel chips. It was proper food, simple and filling and tasting good.

Then there was the complimentary sambuca and biscotti. And it all came to under twenty quid with drinks. I tipped.

We base so many of our shared cultural experiences around food, and then we get hung up on what the food is supposed to look like, or whether it has a French name. We go out for dinner to celebrate birthdays and weddings, and then we spend half the time worrying about napkin etiquette, or whether we’re using the right fork. We make glorious spreads for Christmas and Thanksgiving, which means that one of the family has to miss all the fun because they’re spending four hours fretting in the kitchen. We make food a central component of our lives, and then we forget to enjoy ourselves.

One of the best meals I’ve ever had was a cheap can of stewed steak, with half an Oxo cube crumbled into it, warmed over a Trangia stove outside a tent on the North Yorkshire Moors. It was cold and windy and I’d spent the day trudging pointlessly over moorland in pursuit of some badge or other, and what I wanted was something warm and comforting. Calling it a carbonade wouldn’t have helped.

Proper food is supposed to taste nice and keep you alive until the next meal. The rest is all details.

That said, it can be fun sometimes to experiment with the details, and mess with the twiddly bits. This sort of experimentation should be performed in the spirit of play. If it goes wrong, you laugh, and send for takeaway instead. At the worst you’ll have learned something, and maybe you can make it go better next time.

Okay, at worst you can burn your kitchen down, but I’m not about to let tedious facts get in the way of my carefully constructed argument.

OK, this is a bit of an experiment!

We’ve just posted a mini-episode covering more sous-vide stuff – lamb, chicken, and vegetables, to be precise. It’s info-heavy and quite simple, but hopefully interesting.

We’re really interested to see what you think of this. Would you like to see more mini-episodes? Do you prefer just the high quality of the main episodes? Was it useful? Was it funny?

Let us know.

Here’s the mini-episode again

I’ve been meaning to link to this for a couple of days – over on Reddit, user kynlok took the “Perfect Steak” episode and did some experimentation, with very interesting results .

I have a confession to make, and here is as good a place as any to announce my shame to the world. Here we go. I have never eaten a Findus Crispy Pancake. But I have always wanted to try one.

Which one of those two sentences constitutes the shameful admission depends on what decade you grew up in.

Alex’ post on Thursday got me thinking, as often happens, about ready meals. I like ready meals. I think there’s a case for them, because while I love cooking, I have a job, and sometimes I just want to eat something, soon please, and without generating another sinkload of washing up.

But they have a lot to answer for.

I used to work for Northern Foods, so I feel partly responsible. Horrendous organization; a vast, Kafkaesque bureaucracy full of smug, patronizing businesspeople. They were horrible to me and I’m pretty sure I responded in kind. I worked in Company Secretarial on the corporate side, which is still no excuse for the fact that no one there knew damn-all about food.

As if to prove this, their website smugly brags that they invented the first ready meal, like that’s something to be proud of. They lie, because prepackaged dinners have been around since the 1940s, but since this is something we can blame Northern Foods for, let’s take them at their word for now.

(Bitter? Me? Never.)

When those chillis con carne hit the shelves of M&S, that was the day the rot set in. Slowly at first, but with increasing rapidity throughout the seventies and eighties, people stopped cooking, because they didn’t have to any more. Fast forward thirty years and you have an entire generation for whom the art of making food is a strange and alien pursuit, practiced only by effete wankers on television.

Cooking is easy. You take some ingredients and make them hot. Then they’re cooked, and you’ve turned ingredients into food.

Worse yet, we get towns like Rotherham, which, I’m told, is populated entirely by fat working-class people who live entirely on kebabs. Worse even than that, it takes the Mockney Prat to go to Rotherham and show them that cooking is easy. Thus do we perpetuate the stereotype that cooking is practiced only by effete wankers on television.

More even worser that that, it gives Jamie the impression that he’s some sort of messiah. “I’m just that geezer who keeps doing these worthy things around the country”, says he, apparently without a trace of irony. Perhaps the intention is for him to swell his head to such an extent that his tongue finally fits in it.

Who’d have thought that I could work a reference to Jamie Oliver in there? I don’t have issues, not really, but he’s such an easy target. I promise that subsequent blog entries will attack a broader range of villains.

However, we do have an episode all about Jamie coming up next week, so I might have to talk about him a bit more yet.

A couple of people have asked for a text-format explanation of the techniques that we showed in The Perfect Steak . So, here we go…

The Theory

Sous-vide is a technique for cooking almost anything, which developed from the knowledge that cooked items, particularly meat, develop different characteristics depending on the internal temperature they reach. A steak cooked to 55 degrees will be perfectly medium-rare. A steak with internal temperature of 80 degrees will be bone-dry boot leather. And so on. There’s a table on Wikipedia with a quick summary of the various stages steak will go through, although if you really want to know more you can’t do better than buying On Food And Cooking by Harold McGee

So, we attempt to ensure our meat, veg, or whatever hits this temperature exactly by immersing whatever we want to cook in a water bath held at that temperature – either by electronics, as a restaurant would do it, or in our case by a bored Yorkshireman with a thermometer and a hand on the controls. Then, all we have to do is to wait until the meat has been in the water bath long enough to reach thermal equilibrium – which is comparatively quick because of water’s density and high specific heat capacity.

However, we’re still missing one aspect of cooking steak in a pan – that being the searing that the outside of the meat gets. There are two reasons we want to sear the steak – firstly, to kill bacteria, which assuming you have a healthy piece of meat should only be present on the outside of the meat, and secondly, to stimulate the incredibly tasty Maillard reactions, which are responsible for the “browned” flavours of the meat.

Hence, blowtorch.

Getting up to temperature

Because of the aforementioned high specific heat capacity, getting your water up to temperature tends to take absolutely bloody ages. One excellent suggestion in the comments was to start with a mix 50/50 of cold and boiling water, and also to use as large a pan as you can reasonably find. The former substantially reduces your heating time, whilst the latter ensures that the water bath will take longer to change temperature once you’ve hit the temperature you want, which, as the episode shows, can sometimes be a problem!

Obviously, you’ll need some sort of thermometer to check you’re at the right temperature. A digital probe is probably the best way to go, as it’ll update quickly and accurately.

55 degrees is pretty much the lowest you should consider going. Much lower and you’re risking promoting bacterial growth. Anywhere between 55 and 60 degrees should produce nice medium-rareish steak. By the same token, if you’re going to mess up your cooking temperature, you’re probably best to mess up hotter rather than cooler!

Once you’ve got your water bath up to temperature, keep stirring and checking the temperature every couple of minutes. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to juggle your hob settings to keep a steady temperature – it’s worth trying this if you’re going to cook sous-vide in this way semi-frequently.

Sealing the steak

We need to seal the steak away from the water, or you’ll end up poaching it, which is an entirely different and in this case not nearly so useful technique. We also want to seal it away from the air, because air’s a terribly efficient insulator, and if you have any air pockets in your bag, they’ll insulate sections of your meat away from the water. I’ve had that happen to me with a chicken leg – it’s no fun having half your chicken perfectly cooked and the other half basically raw. To do that, we’re sticking it in a ziploc bag – it’s possible to get bags that are designed for cooking in from most supermarkets, although to be honest at this low temperature and short time I believe most ziploc plastic bags will be OK.

We suck the air out of the bag with a vacuum cleaner for two reasons – one, it minimises the chances of getting steak juices in your mouth (and since raw steak can often carry e. coli amongst other things, that’s something to bear in mind), and two, it looks funny. Provided you’re careful, sucking the air out with a straw or even just using your mouth should be fine.

Now’s the time to insert any flavourings or marinades, too. Acid will tenderise the meat and also inhibit the growth of any bacteria if you’re feeling paranoid, so a little balsamic vinegar will work. I always add salt and pepper to my steak before sealing it, and sometimes some grated garlic too. All sorts of things will work well here – experiment.

Once you’ve stuck it in the bath, set your timer for 90 minutes. Why 90 minutes? Well, to be perfectly honest, that’s a total approximation that we chose because it’ll get most thicknesses of steak up to temperature. If you’ve got a thinner steak, you can take less time, because the temperature gradient will be steeper. There’s more detail on that over at the practical guide to sous-vide . A 1.5cm thick steak, for example, will only require 18 minutes (plus about 5-10 minutes’ “fudge factor”). If you’re attempting to cook half a cow, it’ll take longer – a 5 cm thick steak will take 3 hours. You shouldn’t try to cook anything much thicker than that, because you’re getting into dangerously long cooking times – see below.

Brown the steak and serve it as soon as you take it out of the water bath. Letting the steak cool whilst in a vacuum pack is a Bad Plan, because botulism can grow under those circumstances, and that’s something you really, really don’t want to risk, because having your lungs paralysed is no fun at parties. You can keep the steak in the water bath for a couple of hours if you need to, though – just make sure it doesn’t dip below 55 degrees.

Searing the meat

Once you’ve taken the meat out of the water bath, you still need to sear the meat. Basically, here you want to get all the surface of the meat to above 140 centigrade, to cause the Maillard reactions to happen, which will give the steak all its “crunchy brown” flavours. As an added bonus, the searing should kill absolutely everything dangerous on the surface of the steak.

You can sear using a blowtorch or in a pan. If you’re using a blowtorch, you want a serious plumber’s blowtorch – we’ll investigate the uses of cooks’ blowtorches later on in the series, but right now, just take my word for it they won’t do the job. If you can, you want a more expensive single-gas blowtorch – mixed-gas blowtorches can sometimes impart a flavour to the meat. Yes, it has a flavr.

If you’re using a pan, you want to use an oil with a super-high smoke point. Peanut/Groundnut oil is ideal. Get the pan REALLY DAMN HOT, then add the oil (not the other way around, because you’ll burn the oil) and add the steak. Heston Blumenthal always uses an absolute ton of oil in his recipes when browning, which I think is to get a more even brown, but you can just use a little if you like – just make sure to brown all surfaces of the steak.

Is one better than the other? Glad you asked. We’ll be talking about that later in the series.

In any case, once you’ve got a steak that’s evenly browned all over, congratulations – you have a Perfect Steak.

What about other meats/veg/etc?

Yep, you can cook all kinds of things this way. I’ll be talking more about that on Monday.

Not surprisingly, the three of us disagreed over how to cook the Perfect Steak. If you watch us for long enough, you’ll notice that this is likely to be a running theme.

As mentioned in the programme, Heston Blumenthal (or Dr B, as he’s known) does it differently in his book In Search Of Perfection. There are good reasons for all of the steps he takes, but his version takes about 48 hours to cook. We settled on our version because it can reasonably be made in a domestic kitchen by someone who has a job to go to.

You don’t need an atomic crockpot that auto-regulates the temperature⁰. You don’t really need to use a vacuum cleaner—-you can create a pretty good vacuum seal with your mouth if you don’t mind a face full of raw beef juice. You don’t even need a blowtorch, as we discovered, and then instantly fell out about.

We made two steaks over the course of filming. The one you see in the episode is the one that was sous-vided and blowtorched. The other one was sous-vided in the same way, and then I browned it on the outside the conventional way, by frying it in a pan. Both were marvellous, but opinion was divided on which one was more marvellous. My opinion was that the blowtorched steak had a faint whiff of propane to it, which is not necessarily what you want in a steak. Mine tasted more meaty and steaklike.

The important points you need to get right are: heat the entire steak to 55°C but no higher, which is the perfect temperature for medium rare; and then, heat the outside to (well) over 140° to get the Maillard reactions going¹. How you go about doing that is up to you.

Personally, I find that frying in oil not only develops the Maillard reactions in the meat, but it contributes to the flavour, too. My preference is for peanut oil, which goes really well with the beefy taste of the beef. You still have to be careful not to heat up the inside of the steak too much, so fry it quickly, on a high heat.

Then there’s sauces. Disagreements abound here as well. I’m quite fond of a nice peppercorn sauce, but my flatmate insists that the only possible adulteration for steak is a small pile of salt on one side. He’s right in a way, except for the bit about the salt.

Then there’s the cut. We used fillet and it was amazing. Fillet isn’t generally considered an everyday cut of meat, though, unless your name happens to be Rockefeller. Sirloin is popular, but it’s overrated—-it lacks the fatty chunk that you get in the middle of rump steak, but as a result, it’s drier,less tender, and less flavoursome.

Above all, though, the important thing is this: if you’re going to spend ninety minutes watching a water bath to ensure your steak is perfectly cooked, make sure you buy a good chunk of meat in the first place. This is easy to do if you know how. Support your local butcher. He spends all day chopping up dead animals and watching people pass by his window, then returning from the local supermarket with something unidentifiable wrapped in plastic. It breaks his heart. If those people would stop in to see him instead, he could provide them with a well-aged hunk of deliciousness specially selected from a happy, grass-fed cow.

Once you’ve got hold of a chunk of quality meat, the rest is easy.

⁰ Hugh has one, and it makes it a lot easier. Once we find out how to mass-produce them, you’ll find them in the Shop.

¹ We’ll have more information about Maillard reactions in an upcoming episode. Here’s a short summary for the impatient: Maillard reactions are awesome, and you want to have more of them.

Just over 24 hours since KKCook hit the web, and we’re already getting all sorts of links and mentions around the place! It’s really lovely, and some of the comments have been fantastic – thanks, guys!

Links

• We hit the Grauniad – er – Guardian! Yep, Jemima Kiss wrote up a great piece on our launch entitled Come in Heston Blumenthal, Your Time Is Up .
• We also got a very positive mention – and I’m dead chuffed by this too – over at Khymos.org, which is pretty much the site of record for molecular gastronomy on the web. Woo!
• We’ve been popping up all over Livejournal, del.icio.us, and various other fun places. Thanks, everyone – the links really do help!

Comments

“I was skeptical, but this is classic.”
“Love it – and I’m a vegetarian.”
“Sweet!”
And loads more – again, thanks, guys. Your praise and feedback really makes all the effort worth it.

It’s at around this time of year that loads of people will be moving away from home for the first time to take up university studies. Now I remember when I started my university life, I didn’t know the first thing about cookery, and frankly didn’t care to learn (that came about 3 years later). I was, however, required to somehow keep myself alive during this period, on not much money.

There were lots of student cookbooks, (my parents duly bought me one), but all of these seemed to want you to do things like use more than one ingredient, use herbs, measure things properly, and other such annoying time consuming stuff.

So over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be explaining some of the dos and don’ts of minimalist student cookery. The aim of this endeavour is to eat in a survivable way, very cheaply, with minimal effort, and without everything tasting minging.

1: Cooking, Washing up, and Student culinary life in general.

Do

Fry things on medium setting. Everything fries on medium setting. Other settings are for advanced users.

Cook things for as long as they say. There are lots of corners you can cut – like most of the ingredients – but you’ll just get ill if you undercook stuff.

The washing up. Washing up is a pain. You’ll never feel like doing it, but then, nor will anyone else. However, if no-one does the washing up there won’t be any plates to eat on. If you really neglect this, one of your flatmates might end hating you, or worse, drawing up a washing up rota. This should be avoided at all costs, as it makes you feel like you’re living in a facility.

Make sure you’ve got basic cookery supplies. These include salt, pepper, sugar, cooking oil, washing up liquid, and dishcloths. These all last ages.

Take out the bins. Seriously, it’s not hard. From the horrors I’ve seen, it’s really worth the effort, even if no-one else is doing it.

Don’t

Set fire to stuff you’re cooking. If you’re forgetful (as I am) use a mobile phone alarm or something to make sure you don’t cook it for too long. I seem to mainly burn vegetables, but even these leave your flat reeking of smoke for weeks.

Let the flat have too many pans, plates and cups. I can’t stress this enough. If you’ve got lots of pans, plates and cups, nobody washes up, and the task becomes a 2 hour epic. I once had a friend bring our flat a “gift” of 90 shiny new glasses. Before the month was out, every bloody surface was covered in unwashed glasses.

Leave stuff cooking and go out. This is a recipe for disaster, as you’re pretty likely to end up in the pub and forget about it.

Only eat takeaways. These are probably better than what you’ll normally be eating, but cost a fortune, and tend to make you fat. You don’t actually need to be able to cook to eat hot food.

Steal your flatmates’ stuff if you don’t absolutely know they’re fine with it. Depending on the flatmate, they’ll either hate you forever, move out without telling you, attempt to kill you, or a combination of the three.

Be too aggro to a new flatmate if they don’t do as much washing up as you do. Try to be reasonable, and if they still don’t do it – move out, they never will. I had a friend who fell foul of this one. He got so fed up with his flatmate not doing the washing up that he put the washing up in the flatmate’s bed when he was out. Upon returning from a party that night, he found all of the plates and cups smashed into pieces on his own bed, and a message reading: “if you ever do this again, I will fuck you up” stuck into his door with a knife. Suffice it to say, my friend moved out that week.

Well, that’s all I could think of for basic living. I’ll be back next week with some advice on how to cook meat with minimal effort and stave off scurvy.

Yes, it’s finally here! The first episode of Kamikaze Cookery is now available

In “The Perfect Steak”, we investigate the science of meat cookery, jury-rig equipment for restaurant-style sous-vide with a vacuum cleaner and a blowtorch, and introduce Petunia, our very own smug celebrity chef…

Let us know what you think!

(Once again – watch it here)

We know, we suck. Sorry.

At 11:20, just as we were uploading the last version of KKCook’s first episode, we checked through the episode one last time and discovered… that something hadn’t rendered. At all.

Turns out that something was wrong with the video source.

We’re re-rendering and uploading as fast as we can – expect an ETA of about 13:00 – 13:30 ish.

Update – Sigh. Make that 14:00 ish.

Update 2 – 68% complete rendering.

I’m a huge fan of “molecular gastronomy”, the new school of cooking that studies the chemistry and physics of food to improve its flavour (described as “the scientific study of deliciousness”). It’s the “mad scientist” thing that has made people like Heston Blumenthal famous – but it’s always been pitched as something that only Expert Chefs can do.

Which is total rubbish.

For example, most non-skilled cooks I’ve met are distinctly scared of cooking chicken – they know that it can give you all sorts of nasty food poisoning, and they know that you have to cook it well enough to stop that – but how do you know how well is well? How do you tell if the insides are done? How do you avoid overcooking it whilst at the same time avoiding poisoning people? Traditionally, there are all sorts of tricks that experienced cooks use to figure out if their chicken is done, but a lot of it boils down to experience. With no guidelines, cooking chicken is a bit of a scary experience for a newbie cook.

Unless, that is, you happen to know a couple of scientific facts. You know, say, that all the bacteria in the chicken will be dead, dead, dead if the interior has hit 65 degrees C for a couple of minutes. You know that, the meat won’t get seriously overcooked until it hits 75-80 degrees or so. There’s no judgement or experience required here – they’re just facts.

But you’ve still got the problem of the interior. How do you tell if the meat’s done in the middle? Do you prod and try and guess from the texture? Do you trust to experience?

No, you use a fuckin’ thermometer. You stick it into the middle of the chicken, and then you, you know, read the dial. Or LCD. Or whatever.

And then you, erm, actually KNOW when the chicken’s ready to go. Rather than, effectively, having to make an informed guess. No wonder so many people find conventional cooking so terrifying.

That’s why science helps. Because rather than cookery based on experience, guesswork, half-understood theories and inflexible lists of “things that worked before”, you can actually use reasoning to make your food. And, in my experience, it makes damn good stuff.

And there’s more. Knowing about the science allows you to extend the ways in which you cook, based on the theoretical properties of your food, rather than having to rely on blind trial-and-error. For example, knowing about the way that meat dries up and becomes unpalatable led several chefs, notably Heston Blumenthal, to investigate low-temperature cookery – which home cooks can use, in turn, to avoid problems with roast chicken, for example. Because of the physics of the chicken’s water content, the speed temperature transmits, and the oven it’s placed in, low-temperature roast chicken nearly solves the “dry chicken” problem of a roast that cooks have struggled with for centuries.

Want to know more about Molecular Gastronomy? I’d recommend, most of all, “On Food and Cooking” by Harold McGee (get it from our shop, which is the one-stop shop for all things food sciencey. A lighter read is “Don’t Sweat The Aubergine” (also in the shop), which uses scientific approaches and testing based on works from people like McGee. In the blogosphere, Martin `Khymos` Lersch is the man when it comes to chemistry in the kitchen. And, of course, we’ll be throwing out the science all the time on KKCook, in between the explosions and Top Gear impressions.