Ruhlman's Twenty (2 page)

THINKING IN THE KITCHEN.
It’s underrated. If you have a recipe, do you have to think? When you open a book that says, “Combine A and B, add C, stir, and bake for 20 minutes at 350°F/180°C,” do you simply follow the instructions?

Cooking doesn’t work that way. Cooking is an infinitely nuanced series of actions, the outcome of which is dependent on countless variables. What’s the simplest dish you can think of? Let’s say buttered toast. Can you write a perfect recipe for it? There is no exact way to convey how to make buttered toast and account for all variables. The temperature of the butter has a huge impact on the final result, as does the type of bread, how thick it’s cut, and how hot your toaster gets. Because all the variables in cooking can never be accounted for, whether you’re cooking from a book or cooking by instinct, it stands to reason that the most important first step in the kitchen is simply to think, even if all you’re making is buttered toast.

Thinking in the kitchen is underrated.

Thinking.

Before you begin. Stand still. Think.

It’s an incredibly powerful tool—perhaps your most important tool and technique in the kitchen—but I don’t hear chefs or TV cooking shows talking about it explicitly. Think about thinking for a moment. Can you prove that falling objects accelerate rather than fall at a constant speed simply by thinking about it? This took people thousands of years to realize before Galileo proved it, but we can answer the question by performing a simple thought experiment.

In your mind, hold a brick slightly above a bucket full of water and drop it. Imagine the splash. Now, in your mind, hold the brick as high as you can over the bucket. You know what’s going to happen and why—you’re jumping back before that brick hits the water. Why will the splash be bigger? Because the brick held from high up is traveling much faster than the brick held low. You’ve just suggested that falling objects accelerate rather than travel at a uniform rate, a critical rule of physics, just by thinking about it.

When you’re cooking, imagine what is about to happen. Imagine what you expect something to look like. A piece of meat in a sauté pan— how seared should it look? What should the oil look like before you put the meat in the pan? If it doesn’t match up with the image in your head, ask yourself why. You’re told to reduce the cream by half. Imagine what the bubbles will look like when that cream has lost half its water. Think about it. If that cream boils over, as cream often does, what does that mean? Does it mean you have a mess on your stove? Yes. But more important, it means you have less cream in the pot than you may need, now that half of it is smoking on the burner. Think about what you’re cooking. Stay ahead of it.

Organize and prepare. These are the two critical acts in a kitchen, and they happen by thinking first. Begin any task with these two acts—organize and prepare—and you’re on your way. Ignore them and you’ve put yourself at risk even before you’ve begun. Ninety-five percent of kitchen failures can be traced back to a failure to organize and prepare at the outset.

Restaurant kitchens have a French term for organization and preparation—and it’s every bit as useful in a home kitchen—
Mise en place
.

Mise en place
(MEEZ ohn plahs) translates literally to “put in place,” but what it really means is “organize and prepare.” It means everything in its place, on your countertop, beside your stove, on your stove, and, most critically,
in your mind
.

Mise en place
is a restaurant description of a cook’s station and all the sixth and ninth pans filled with minced shallot and roasted peppers and green beans that have been cooked off and shocked, the trays in the lowboy cooler with the portioned beef, lamb, and pork, the bain-marie
insert filled with spatula, sauce spoon, and ladle. It’s a setup designed to make successful the improbable ability to cook and serve dozens and dozens of different dinners, many simultaneously, in a very short time, day after day after day. It works.

There’s no reason it won’t work for you in your kitchen at home. All you have to do is decide to do it. Stop and think before you begin.

The importance of mise en place cannot be overstated. It doesn’t mean simply putting all your ingredients in ramekins on your cutting board or next to your stove (let alone, if you’re following a recipe, to have read the recipe all the way through). It’s ultimately about thinking. Organizing your mise en place forces you to think through your actions, to plan in your mind the course of your actions.

The second mandate in the ethos of mise en place, one that is rarely made explicit, is to recognize not only what you need in front of you, but also what does not belong, what should not be on your board, beside the stove, in your brain.

One of the keys to successful cooking is to remove obstacles that may be in your path. Clear your way. If cooking is an unbroken series of actions, one motion leading to another leading to another, then it should be obvious that any obstacles that might trip up those actions ought to be removed before you begin. Clear your path, and you are less likely to stumble. This means having all your ingredients before you and having the mixing bowl out so that you don’t have to interrupt your cooking to hunt for it. It also means removing anything extraneous from your work area. Get rid of the shopping list, empty glass of milk, and car keys on your counter. Even if the objects are out of your way but still in your vision, remove them.

Here is a moment I will never forget. I was working the grill station in the American Bounty Restaurant—the final restaurant in the curriculum at the Culinary Institute of America—for my book
The Making of a Chef.
Chen, a fellow student, was working sauté, perhaps the busiest station on the line. And he was a mess. Onion peelings, scraps of brown towel that had been used to light burners, spilled salt and pepper, and encrusted sauce covered his work surfaces. Chen was doing 360s trying to keep up with the pace, deep in the weeds, when the chef instructor, Dan Turgeon, stepped in and stopped him. He forced Chen to stop.

“When you’re in the weeds,” he said to Chen, “this clutter starts to build up.” He surveyed the mess on Chen’s station. “If they cut you open, this is what your brain would look like.”

I laughed because Turgeon stated exactly what weeds are like. When you are working hard and fast, you are thinking about what you’re cooking, and you are imagining what you’re cooking should look like. What happens in this busy-ness of cooking is that what you are imagining and what your eyes are actually seeing merge. When clutter is in your field of vision, it can trip up your thoughts, and you stumble mentally, slow down, and have to recover.

Chen stopped, wiped down his station, and returned to the work of cooking.

There are all kinds of home cooks—people who cook to unwind; people who cook as a hobby; people who cook because they want to feed their family healthful, tasty, economical meals; and people who cook because it’s the least objectionable option in fulfilling a daily need. Regardless of what kind of cook you are, the most basic rules apply. First and foremost is that cooking is easier, faster, more efficient, more successful, and more fun when you think first, when you prepare and organize, when you set up your
mise en place.

This is not an additional step—it’s simply doing all that you would do throughout the cooking anyway. You’re just doing it ahead of time, spending less time between cupboard and counter, refrigerator and stove. Be sure your
counter or work area is completely clear. Go to the refrigerator, pull everything you’re going to need, and set it out. Go to the cupboard, and pull everything there you’ll need. Gather your tools beside your cutting board, set the pans you’ll need on the stove, and get the oven hot if you’re using it. Think about the sequence of your actions. And
then
begin to work, and as you work, while you’re doing one thing, think about what you’ll be doing next and next after that.

Clear your way. Always be thinking.

I’VE SHARED THIS STORY BEFORE,
but it bears repeating since the truth of it feels so obvious to me now. Yet it arrived like a rap on the skull with a cop’s nightstick. It was winter of 1998, and I’d just begun working with Thomas Keller on
The French Laundry Cookbook.
We were talking a lot about food and cooking, and I asked what would seem to be an obvious question but is one I don’t often see chefs asked: “What’s the most important thing for a cook to know?”

He didn’t pause long before saying, “Seasoning.”

“Seasoning, meaning what?” I asked.

“Salt and pepper,” he said. Then he narrowed it further. “Salt, really. How to use salt.”

“How to use salt?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s the first thing we teach new cooks. How to season the food.”

I’d been to culinary school, where learning to season food was talked about continually. It was one of the first things I’d learned in my first kitchen, when we were making basic soups. We were taught to taste a soup, then taste it with a little more salt to see the difference. We were also told to do the same thing with vinegar. We were taught that if you tasted the salt, it was too salty. But I was never told that using salt was the most important act in the kitchen. I’d interviewed scores of chefs, and no one had ever said the most important thing to know how to do in the kitchen is how to salt your food. And yet it’s true.

I would go on eventually to write books about charcuterie and
salumi,
the craft of preserving meats, which relies heavily on salt. Salt is a fundamental ingredient in understanding the history of civilization precisely because it enabled us to preserve food, thousands of years before refrigeration and transportation made food so accessible. It allowed food to travel long distances, either as goods to trade or as sustenance for long voyages in world exploration. Salt was once more valuable than precious metals; men were paid with it. Salt is, I’m not the first to point out, the only rock we eat.

All this I would come to know, but when Keller said what he did, I felt an immediate jolt and revelation:
of course.
It made so much sense. It was always in the air, the notion of seasoning. It was the most common directive from chef to cook. When something was wrong with a dish, the most common reason was too little or too much salt. There was even a hand gesture that most people in restaurants pick up through osmosis, the gesture for seasoning: pinching all the fingers together and rotating the hand as if sprinkling salt. If you’re at a restaurant that only offers salt on the table by request, catch a waiter’s eye and make this gesture, and he or she will simply nod and bring you salt. How to salt food is the most important thing to know in the kitchen. And it’s partly why people often find restaurant food salty. Because chefs know how important salting is and want to get the seasoning exactly right, they sometimes push it a little too far. Salt is so powerful that when you do take it too far, it can ruin the food.

Because our bodies need salt to survive, our palates have become highly attuned to salt. We like it, but we also sense when there’s too much. Too much can hurt us. Now that our contemporary diet relies to such an extent on processed food, where sodium hides out in many forms, often unnoticed by our tongues, the side effects of consuming too much salt, namely hypertension, can lead to a number of serious problems and have become a national concern. There are many reasons to avoid eating processed foods—food in cans and brightly colored bags and sealed in microwave-ready plastic—and their high sodium content is one. If you don’t have a preexisting problem with high blood pressure and if you eat natural foods—foods that aren’t heavily
processed—you can salt your food to whatever level tastes good to you without worrying about health concerns.

Of the many different kinds of salt, the one I recommend for everyday use is coarse kosher salt, preferably Diamond Crystal, or, if that’s not available, Morton’s, which has an anticaking agent.

The primary reason for using a coarse salt is that salt is best measured with your fingers and eyes, not with measuring spoons. Coarse salt is easier to hold and easier to control than fine salt. Salting is an inexact skill, meaning there is no way to describe in words how much salt to use in any given dish. Instead, it is up to the cook, a matter of taste. Also, people’s salt preferences differ, given one’s experience and expectations of saltiness. So always salt to taste. When a recipe for a sauce or a stew includes a precise measure of salt, a teaspoon, say, this is only a general reference, or an order of magnitude—a teaspoon, not a tablespoon. You may need to add more. How do you know? Taste the food.

Because you should salt your food throughout the cooking, it only makes practical sense that you measure with your fingers. If you have to use measuring spoons every time you add salt, you’d drive yourself crazy. And since salting is an inexact skill, it doesn’t make sense in most cooking to use measuring spoons.

Learn to season by feel and by sight. It will make cooking easier. If you pay attention, you will soon learn how much a teaspoon of salt is by looking at it. Measure out a teaspoon of coarse salt, hold it in your palm, and get to know what a loose teaspoonful looks like. Try picking up as much salt as you can between four fingers and your thumb. Measure it. Pick up as much salt between three fingers and your thumb. Measure it. Now you know how much salt you’re adding and don’t have to dig around for measuring spoons. As I’ve said before, my favorite kitchen gadgets are at the end of my arms.

It’s important to use the same brand of salt; otherwise you won’t be able to teach yourself how to season consistently. Diamond Crystal is flakier than Morton’s. Morton’s is denser, so that the same volume is saltier than Diamond Crystal; a tablespoon of Morton’s weighs more. If you’re used to seasoning with Diamond Crystal and you start using Morton’s, you may well oversalt your food.

Again, the reason to use coarse salt is that it’s easy to control. But if you feel more comfortable using-fine grain salt, there’s no reason you shouldn’t. I met one chef who preferred it because it dissolved more quickly in liquids than coarse salt. There are many good fine-grain salts, usually sea salts, to choose from. Fine sea salt is my preference for salting fish. Here again, use your senses. A tablespoon of fine sea salt can weigh twice as much as coarse kosher salt. That means if a recipe calls for a tablespoon of kosher salt and you use a tablespoon of fine sea salt, you will have added twice the amount of salt called for in the recipe.

Do not use iodized salt.
It has a chemical taste that’s not good for your food. Salt companies began adding potassium iodide to salts in the 1920s to prevent iodine deficiencies, which could lead to serious thyroid problems. This is no longer a concern in developed countries. If you eat a relatively balanced diet, you shouldn’t need to worry about your thyroid, and you certainly don’t want the unpleasant flavor in your food. Don’t use regular, granulated table salt, for the same reason; it has additives that don’t taste good.

An important note about salt in these recipes: All recipes use Morton’s coarse kosher salt so that volume and weight are the same—that is, 1 tablespoon of salt is ½ ounce/15 grams.

In addition to ordinary sea salt, which may contain trace mineral elements, numerous “finishing” salts are now widely available, such as fleur de sel (harvested in France) and Maldon salt (harvested in England), Himalayan pink salt (not to be confused with tinted curing salt), black salt from India, smoked salts, and salts infused with flavors (plum, truffle, saffron, vanilla, mushrooms). My favorites are
fleur de sel
and Maldon, which have a fresh, clean flavor and a lovely delicate crunch; they add flavor, visual appeal, and textural pleasure to foods. They tend to be expensive, so you wouldn’t want to use them in cooking, only as a finishing garnish. These are a matter of taste; if you’re into specialty salts, there are plenty to explore
(see Sources).
But garnishing salts and kosher salt for cooking should be thought of as two different entities entirely.

First and foremost is salt’s use in general cooking. It heightens flavors across the board, morning, noon, and night, from savory to sweet. It should be the first thing you think about once you’re organized and begin cooking. I begin salting immediately. When the first onions go into the pan to sweat, I follow them with a little salt, which both seasons them and helps begin to draw out moisture and get them cooking. When the main ingredient goes into the pan, tomatoes for a sauce, say, so does a little more salt. Not too much, but in an hour, when I taste that sauce, it’s going to have a little more depth and flavor than had I not seasoned it. Sure, I could season all at once, right at the end, but the flavor will be a little different. The sauce will lack depth and balance, and may even taste salty.

Stocks, soups, sauces, and stews all benefit from early salting rather than salting at the end, which gives the salt no opportunity to distribute itself throughout the ingredients. You’ve got to give salt a little time to work its magic.

One of the most powerful uses of salt is on meat. When to salt may be the most influential factor in salt’s overall impact on the meat. In most cases, you can’t salt meat too early. I recommend you salt your meat as soon as you bring it home from the store and then wrap it up. The salt will dissolve and penetrate the muscle so that the meat is uniformly seasoned inside and out. The old-school French guys will tell you not to salt early because doing so sucks out the juices. This is not a valid point. It’s mainly water that’s being drawn out, thus concentrating the meat flavor, not vitiating it. Salting early has an additional health and flavor benefit in that it inhibits spoilage bacteria. If you brought home some fresh pork chops and you salted one immediately but did not salt the other, and left them in the refrigerator for a week, the unsalted pork chop will likely have begun to develop off odors and will feel faintly slimy. The salted pork chop will escape those fates because it has, in a sense, been mildly cured, or preserved.

The thicker the cut, the earlier you need to salt it. If you’re planning a very large cut, such as a rib roast, it’s best to salt it a few days before cooking (and leave it uncovered in the refrigerator to dry a little and concentrate the flavors).

The only time I don’t salt meat well in advance is when I want the salt to remain on the
surface and help form a kind of crust. One example is a chicken to be roasted. If you salt a chicken well in advance of cooking, or if you brine a chicken, the salt will dehydrate the skin, and the skin, when roasted, will be a smooth, shiny golden brown. This is fine if that’s how you like it. But I like a salty, crusty skin on a roasted bird, so I salt a chicken aggressively, using about a tablespoon of salt, just before it goes into a very hot oven.

But as a rule, you can’t salt meat too early.

Fish is so delicate that big grains of coarse salt can actually “burn” the flesh. It’s best to use fine sea salt for fish and to apply it just before cooking. If it’s a big or whole piece, you can season it a little after it comes out of the heat. If you’re poaching fish, season the poaching liquid
(see technique #17, Poach).

Salt has a powerful osmotic effect on organic material. Salt provides the mechanism for our cells to exchange nourishment, and this is how salt can penetrate to the center of a brined pork loin. The presence of salt draws water across a cell’s membrane in an attempt to equalize the concentration of salt on either side of that cell. Because vegetables have such a high proportion of water, salt’s impact on both flavor and texture is substantial and rapid.

Salt slices of eggplant/aubergine for a good example of salt’s ability to leach water from a vegetable. This collapses the cells and reduces the eggplant’s ability to absorb cooking oil, resulting in a leaner finished dish. Or transform the texture of zucchini/courgettes for a delectable bite and flavor.

To understand salt’s impact on flavor, try comparing a tomato slice that has been salted for ten minutes and one that has not been salted. The difference is so powerful that you will always remember to salt tomatoes well before serving them. Also keep in mind that the juices drawn out are very flavorful and can be added to a vinaigrette or blended with butter for a sauce.

Because of salt’s power over these water-heavy foods, it’s important not to salt them too early or they can turn to mush. Too much water flooding from their cells will cause the vegetables to collapse and give them an unpleasant texture. They can actually become more difficult to chew than fully hydrated vegetables.

Salting fruits heightens both their flavor and their sweetness. Salting watermelon is a perfect example. Sprinkle a little salt on a slice of watermelon and taste—it’s delicious. This is why melon works so well with salty ingredients such as feta cheese or prosciutto.

Consider the many recipes that say, “Bring a pot of salted water to a boil.” What exactly does that mean? It’s like a recipe that reads, “Get a piece of meat and give it flavor.”

Here is the truth about salted water. There are two kinds: 1) water you use to cook pasta, grains, and legumes, and 2) water you use to cook green vegetables.

There was a time in my life, ages ten through thirty-three, when I would put a pinch of salt into a big pot of pasta water, believing it would actually do something. What was I
thinking?
Was I thinking?

It wasn’t until I was in culinary skills class, having cooked pasta, oh, about a million times, that someone told me to taste the pasta water. It should taste nicely seasoned, my chef instructor said, and we should evaluate it as we had evaluated a clear soup’s seasoning. That way, your pasta will be nicely seasoned, too.