There is Always Another Way of Doing Something - Bee Wilson 🌞

There is Always Another Way of Doing Something

Try new things . . . Since you’re not going to be
able to make dishes taste the way they do in the
restaurant, make them taste right for you.’
Daniel Patterson, Coi

One of the many stumbling blocks to cooking is the sense that there is a
single proper way of doing things that you must follow – or else. But the
truth of the matter is that there is always another way of preparing
something in the kitchen. You should find the one that works for you and
gives you the most pleasure as you go without worrying too much about
correctness or authenticity.

If one form of cooking freaks you out, simply find another way. If using
knives to chop a red pepper makes you shudder, use scissors instead. If
handling raw meat makes you worry about bacteria, cook vegetarian meals
(which is probably something we should all be doing a lot more of
anyway). If intense heat alarms you, focus your cooking around learning
how to compose delicious salads. If you fear pressure cookers, you never
have to use one (though be assured that the new electric ones are not at all
fearsome). None of these things makes you a terrible cook. It just makes
you human. There is always another way of doing things that you might
find more enjoyable. There are enough things to be scared of in this world
without making the kitchen one of them.

Sometimes we trap ourselves in certain dogmas in the kitchen only to
find that another way works just as well or better and is easier. For years,
every recipe involving dried beans would warn of dire consequences if you
added the salt too soon. Cookery writers cautioned that the beans would
harden and they would never cook properly! It turns out this is total
nonsense. Adding salt to the water doesn’t harden the beans as they cook; it
only makes them tastier. By the same token, yeasted bread dough doesn’t
have to be kneaded, which is one of the most extraordinary discoveries of
modern baking.

Another unquestioned mantra is the phrase ‘preheat the oven’ which
appears at the start of almost every recipe. Often, the instruction is added
far too early, the result being that an empty oven is left blasting out heat
while you are occupied with doing vegetable prep. It’s an understandable
convention. Most readers want to know how hot the oven will be before
they start a recipe, so the writer decides to get the information out of the
way early on, but this doesn’t mean that you need to do it immediately. I
find that it’s a good idea to make a note of how long it takes your particular
oven to reach standard temperatures and factor this in when following
recipes. I also discovered to my amazement that more often than not, an
oven doesn’t need to be preheated at all. Roast chicken and pound cake are
actually better when you start them in a cold oven; recipes for both are
given below. Most kinds of roasted vegetables also work fine from a cold
start (though not classic roast potatoes, which need to go into a pan of
sizzling-hot oil).

The best way to cook anything is the one that works best for you and
your life right now. When my children were younger and tugging at my
ankles to make me sit on the floor and play, I was a big fan of putting things
in the oven where they were safely out of the way and no one could get
burned. But now that they are older, I am returning to cooking things on the
hob much of the time, which is not only more energy-efficient but gives me
the pleasure of some meditative stirring and good cooking smells at the end
of a long day.

Sometimes the best way to cook something is not to cook it at all. Don’t
apply heat to what is better served raw. There is nothing you can do to a
perfectly ripe peach or fig or to a pod of young crunchy peas that will
improve it, so you may as well spare yourself the trouble.
Perhaps the strongest reason to experiment with different ways of
cooking is that you might discover new ways of cooking favourite
ingredients which please you more. It’s easy to get in the groove of cooking
something in a particular way, maybe to please your partner or other family
members, without ever considering whether it is the way that you like best.

A friend from Romania says that when her father died, her mother finally
felt free to cook polenta the way she actually enjoyed it, without the
potatoes that her husband always insisted on.It can take trial and error to
find the approach to cooking something that will excite you the most, both
in the eating and the cooking. Asparagus is my favourite vegetable – I think
of it as one of the great luxuries of spring and summer – but for years, I felt
it would be almost taboo to cook it in any way except boiled. I was not alone
in being so unimaginative about asparagus. There are nineteen asparagus
recipes in Haute Cuisine by Jean Conil, first published in 1953, and except
for one recipe for green asparagus soufflé, they all consist of boiling it and
serving it hot or cold with a sauce.

The recipe that changed how I think about asparagus was River Café
penne with asparagus carbonara, which I first read about in the year 2000.
This was a carbonara, but with spears of asparagus cut on the diagonal in
place of the pancetta. The thing that startled me was the wondrous economy
of the method. While the pasta boiled until al dente for nine minutes, you
cooked the asparagus in a separate pan. The stalks were added first, then,
after two minutes, the tips, which cooked for a further four minutes. The
blanched asparagus was tossed with pasta, yolks, Parmesan, butter and
thyme to make a richly springlike dish: green and golden. The first time I
made it, I couldn’t believe that the asparagus had come out so perfectly with
so little effort. I never used my asparagus boiler again, realising that I could
boil the spears unbundled in a big pan for 5 minutes, with none of the fuss
and better results.

And then I realised – finally! – that asparagus didn’t have to be boiled,
after all. It was Yotam Ottolenghi who convinced me that chargrilled
asparagus could make a welcome change from plain-boiled. Freshly
harvested asparagus contains a lot of natural sugar, and charring it
accentuates both its sweetness and its umami flavours. Ottolenghi’s first
cookbook contained a recipe for chargrilled asparagus, courgette and
halloumi cheese salad. The asparagus was blanched before it was charred
with thin slices of courgette and anointed with garlicky basil oil. The firm
bright spears took on a savoury depth that was a revelation. I have since
discovered that I like charred asparagus even more if it is sliced up, tossed
with salt and oil and browned for 5–10 minutes under a very hot grill, with
lemon zest added at the end.

The best way to cook asparagus, I am now convinced, is neither boiled
nor grilled but butter-braised (braising being a French term which originally
meant cooking in an enclosed pot with a charcoal fire above and below). By
braising, I mean browning the asparagus in a single layer in a large frying
pan before cooking with butter and a splash of water or stock until the
liquid emulsifies to a glossy sauce, which takes less than 10 minutes.
Braised asparagus offers both the browned intensity of charred asparagus
and the delicacy of boiled. My introduction to braised asparagus was J.
Kenji López-Alt’s excellent recipe on the Serious Eats website. As López
Alt writes, during its brief season, we should embrace asparagus ‘in all its
forms from raw and crunchy to braised, olive-green and totally tender’. If
you don’t try things a different way once in a while, you will never know
what you are missing.

From "The Secret of Cooking"
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77264998-the-secret-of-cooking

Be brave! Try something new. Experiment!!