highlights from Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat 🌱

SALT

• How salty is the salt that you have? A tablespoon of fine salt will be much saltier than a tablespoon of coarser salt (since it’s more densely packed)
• Cooking with salt is usually much more impactful than sprinkling salt on something after cooking it
• Even if the type of salt is the same, the saltiness from different brands is huge
• The rate at which salt dissolves in a dish when you cook it is very important. Salt needs time to dissolve before you can actually taste the dish and figure out how much more to add. If you taste your dish before the salt has had time to dissolve then the dish will appear to be less salty than it actually is.
• Keep two kinds of salt on hand: kosher or bulk-bin sea salt for everyday cooking, special flaky salt with a nice texture to use as a garnish
• Salt unlocks hidden flavors and reduces our perception of bitterness (better than sugar does)
• Taste and adjust salt level as you cook
• How Salt Works
  • Osmosis: the movement of water across a cell wall from the less salty side to the saltier side
  • Diffusion: slower process of salt moving from a saltier environment to a less salty one until it’s evenly distributed throughout.
• When we sprinkle salt on meat and wait, the diffusion will create a balance of salt inside the meat and outside it, resulting in it tasting evenly seasoned. Water will also move on the outside of the meat due to osmosis. (In other words, wait enough time for diffusion to occur when you salt something!
• Some think that salt dries out meat due to osmosis. However, (with time) disrupts the protein structure of meet and prevents it from densely coagulating when heated. This allows the water molecules on the outside of the proteins to remain bound so that the meat remains moist when cooked.
• Salting most meats a day in advance is a good idea. The larger, denser, or more sinewy the meet is the more in advance you should salt it. Also the colder the environment where the salt is, the longer the reaction with salt will take.
• If you salt meat for too long it will dry out and become cured.
• Seafood can’t handle salting for long in advance, so just salt it for 15 minutes before cooking
• Fatty parts have less water than the muscle and other parts of meat, so the fat doesn’t absorb salt as well. Just be mindful of this if you have fatty meat. If you want to add salt to mayonnaise or something, then you can just add an ingredient that has more water content for the salt to be absorbed easier.
• Vegetable and fruit cells contain an undigestible carbohydrate called pectin which can be softened by cooking and with salt.
• More water in food = quicker salt absorption so just be mindful of this
• Salt strengthens gluten, the protein that makes dough chewy and flexible
• Salt the water you use to blanch/boil and taste the water after letting the salt dissolve to know how much more salt to add. You salt this water for the same diffusion reasons.
• Sometimes you can add salt in the form of a salty ingredient like Parmesan or anchovies. Always taste food to see what it needs more of.
• If you oversalt, add more unsalty ingredients to your food that will absorb some of the salt.
• If you want to experiment adding stuff to your food, you can take just a part of it and experiment with just that part. Then if it tastes good make the adjustment to the whole dish

FAT

• Fats can act as a main ingredient, a cooking medium, and a seasoning
• Fats have significant influences on flavor and texture in dishes based on their impact on chemical reactions in cooking.
• Cooking fats can be heated to extreme temperatures which allows the surface temperature of foods cooked in them to climb to astonishing heights which makes the foods crispy and golden brown. Water can’t withstand high heats like this to let food brown.
• Canola oil is a good cooking oil because it doesn’t taste like anything and has a high smoke point (can withstand high temperature before smoking).
• Some fats can enrich flavor when added to food just before serving it.
• Fat coats the tongue which allows aromatic compounds to stay in contact with our taste buds for longer.
• Animal fat is more aromatic and tastes more like meat than its lean meat. So, it is typically mixed in with meats to make them more rich and moist
• Fats that are within the animals muscle (marbling) melt away when cooked, enhancing the flavor of the meat. However, clumps of fat that are separate are perhaps layered between groups of muscle and just external do not taste good when cooked. You can take these chunks of fat and melt them down to be used as a cooking medium (that will lend the meaty flavor to what you cook in it)
• Which fats we use determines the flavor, and how we use them determines the texture
• Some foods release fat and others absorb it when cooking. Make sure that there is always enough to cook the food with.
• As oil is heated it breaks down leading to flavor degradation and the release of toxic chemicals. So, heat your pan first and then put oil on just when you’re ready to cook. (Don’t do this with butter though because it will burn).
• When cooking meats with fat inside them, make sure to cook slowly enough to give the fat enough time to render (cooked until water inside the fat has evaporated), because this can prevent meat from crisping. Also make sure every part of the meat is cooked so the fat can render.
• Butter is an emulsion of water and fat and the water and fat naturally want to separate. This is what happens when butter melts. This is why the temperature of butter in recipes is important, because the emulsion impacts dishes differently
• To emulsify, you break down the large molecules and join together the smaller ones which you can form by whisking
• People knead dough and mix batter to lengthen chains of gluten which makes the bread chewier.. Sugar and acids discourage gluten development. Fat can also inhibit gluten networks from forming. This is the reason for the term shortening (as in shortbread cookies), because these doughs have little gluten development due to flour and fat being intimately melded together. Melting butter into dough can also encourage gluten development if the water molecules get absorbed into the flour.
• Important to wait for oven to preheat before you stick in baked goods so that the water in the butter can quickly evaporate and the filling doesn’t make the baked good soggy.
• When baking you can whip together butter to trap air bubbles into your batter. Don’t go too fast though or it will create heat through friction. If the butter gets too hot the butter emulsion will break and if the butter is too cold air con’t be able to mix into the batter. Baking soda/powder help expand air bubbles already in batter by releasing CO2, they don’t add any new air bubbles so incorporating air is important to leaven your baked good.

ACID

• Of the five basic tastes acid causes our mouths to water the most because our mouths flood with saliva to balance the acidity which is bad for our teeth.
• Acid balances: consider lemonade with only lemon juice and water. This will be gross and acidic until we add sugar, then it will be yummy, however the pH of the liquid will remain the same after the sugar.
• Acid dulls vibrant greens, but it can prevent oxidation (enzymatic browning from oxygen exposure) of raw fruits and vegetables with soaking
• Acid keeps vegetables and legumes tougher or longer and make them cook more slowly since they have cellulose or pectin.
• Baking soda can making cooking water more alkaline (more resistance to changes in acidity)
• Acid encourages bonds between pectin groups so that they can trap water to help set jam/jelly
• Chemical leavenings like baking soda/powder need acid to react and release CO2
• Acid encourages proteins in egg white to coagulate which inhibits them from tightening when cooking and squeezing out water.
• Acid can encourage more, finer air pockets in whipped egg whites
• Acid prevents fluent development
• When acid comes into contact with proteins it uncoils them (tenderizing meat), then continued exposure will cause the uncoil strands to tangle and coagulate (toughening the meat).
• Acid can help break down collagen (the main structural protein in touch cuts of meat) which allows meat to become more tender
• Browning floods creates some acid, fermentation also creates acid
• Always balance sweetness with acid. This is why chocolate and coffee make great bases for something sweet because they themselves are bitter and rich in umami
• Acid must not only balance with the dish itself, but the whole meal. It must complement the other things you eat in the meal

HEAT

• Pay attention to the food not the heat to know how to adjust the heat
• Heat is energy: it gives the particles in your food energy making the molecules speed up and sometimes break apart to meet with new atoms and form new molecules
• When food has too much water the flavor will be diluted and by cooking the food longer you can reduce it (lower the water content to make it richer in flavor)
• When frozen water expands. When you see ice crystals have formed on your food in the freezer, this is a result of water within the cells expanding and forcing the cell walls to burst, releasing the water which forms ice crystals on the surface.
• Trapping steam can keep the food moist and prevent browning.
• Salt can draw out the water win food with osmosis, which can create steam. Be mindful of this when choosing when to salt.
• Fat is slow to cool and heat.
• The starchiest parts of plants need to cook slowly in water since starches absorb liquid and swell/break down
• As heat penetrates say a boiling carrot, its starches break down into simple sugars and the cell walls enclosing these sugars disintegrate which frees them to reach our taste buds more readily
• The small number of sugars that vegetables contain begin to disappear and convert to starch the moment they are picked. Nothing we can do about this since we can only buy ingredients from the grocery store, but it’s interesting.
• Preserve tender cuts of meat with careful, quick cooking using intense heat (don’t let tender red meat get to internal temperature over 140F (160 for chicken) or else the proteins will coagulate and expel water and being chewy and overcooked)
• Tougher cuts of meat need to be cooked on low heat for a long time. Heat will transform collagen into gelatin with water and time, making the meat tender.
• Maillard reaction
• You can use intense heat to brown the surface of tough cuts of meat and then switch to low heat to cook the inside or do the inverse. Either is good.
• The temperature of food when you start cooking has a dramatic impact on the food when you cook it. Chicken is much more dense than hot over air, so cooking it straight from the fridge vs when it’s room temperature will make the cook time longer and which can dry it out.
• Heat degrades the cell walls of food releasing aromas.
• Use stainless steel or cast iron when searing meat (not nonstick) and don’t use that much fat since it is less of a cooking medium and more about getting uniform contact between meat and pan (not from book). Searing is really only used to get Maillard reaction, and doesnt actually cook meat that much which is why it’s great for steak
• If the amount of liquid you are reducing is more than 3 inches deep, using multiple pots will quicken reduction by allowing steam to escape more quickly. This will also reduce how much the flavor changes by
• Stirring dissipates heat which will prevent the Maillard reaction
• Never cook directly over the flame when grilling. This introduces carcinogens into the food.
• Let meat rest for a bit after cooking which gives the proteins time to relax and retain water better.
• When you first bake goodies, high temperatures will cause water to vaporize into steam which will push apart layers of baking dough and give your food much more volume.
• Be careful not to make oven too hot or fats can catch on fire
• Foods that require long exposure to gentle heat are cooked in advance and reheated while delicate foods that cook quickly are cooked to order.
• When fat starts sputtering (not sizzling) this can mean it’s time to flip meat or tip some fat out of the pan