Emulsions separate, we settle
It took me awhile to believe that this apartment and the many unfilled hours inside it were my whole world now. Like a Trumpian id buried in my psyche, a part of me kept saying, Only two weeks, only two weeks. But it’s been that and then some, and while mental health maintenance is still my main priority, I’m trying to keep going with the rest of my life.
So it’s time to take culinary school to my kitchen! I’m finding ways to self-structure my education. As I see it, what I want to study boils down (haha) to three main areas: Cooking, baking and fermentation. They each operate on generally different timescales and require different forms of attention. Cooking is mostly about tasting along the way. Baking frequently uses different senses, like touch, smell, and sight, that act as clues to the chemistry going on inside. Fermentation — which I know the least about — seems to be a bit of both, where some parts can be tasted along the way but the full result may only emerge glorious or gross after weeks of waiting. Of course, everything interacts and mixes up and builds on each other and that’s what makes the food good.
I’m using a number of different methods to learn all this at home, which I’ll talk about in later posts, but I’ll start with cookbooks. Not all cookbooks will teach you how to cook. They give you recipes but don’t explain why all the ingredients are there or why steps must be done in the order they prescribe. It’s up to you to extrapolate and unearth principles you can apply outside of the recipes. Some cookbooks, though, are more like textbooks. Salt, Acid, Fat, Heat is highly technical. It takes you through what are essentially chemistry lessons in how salt, acid, fat, and heat interact with each other, and then offers recipes as hands-on demos of those lessons. Samin Nosrat’s charm and humor also spill out through the words and illustrations of the book, which make it immensely more enjoyable to learn about the Maillard reaction.
Six Seasons is by Joshua McFadden, an NYC restaurant chef who later joined a farm up in Maine. Each section is organized around a season (summer is divided into early-, mid-, and late-, hence the extra two seasons) and then sub-organized by a vegetable from that season. He tells you a bit about how it’s grown, how to store it and prepare it for cooking, then walks you through a few recipes that highlight different cooking methods (including raw). Again, these recipes aren’t meant to be followed to the letter, but demonstrate the breadth of a particular vegetable and give you hints about how it behaves with different kinds of heat or taste pairings. If I’ve got something beautiful and fresh from the farmer’s market and I want to use it well, this is the first cookbook I go to.
I’ve ordered The Noma Guide to Fermentation from Word Bookstore (support your local bookstores!) so I’m hoping that’ll be the next comprehensive tome I get to dig into.
Is there a dish (meatless, please) that you’ve always wanted to make but haven’t figured out? Give me a problem, and I’ll work on it! If you’re in Brooklyn, I may even deliver it to you…
What I’m reading
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking, by Samin Nosrat
One of the great alchemical wonders of the kitchen, an emulsion happens when two liquids that normally don’t mix together or dissolve give up and join together. In the kitchen, an emulsion is like a temporary peace treaty between fat and water. The result is tiny droplets of one liquid dispersed in another, resulting in a creamy mixture that’s neither one nor the other. Butter, ice cream, mayonnaise, and even chocolate — if it’s creamy and rich, chances are it’s an emulsion.
Consider a vinaigrette: oil and vinegar. Pour the two liquids together and the oil, being less dense, will float above the vinegar. But whisk the two liquids together — breaking them up into billions of tiny droplets of water and oil — and the vinegar will disperse into the oil, creating a homogenous liquid with a new, thicker consistency. This is an emulsion.
Yet little more than momentary bewilderment will hold together this simple vinaigrette…When an emulsion breaks, the fat and water molecules begin to coalesce back into their own troops. In order to make an emulsion more stable, use an emulsifier to coat the oil and allow it to exist contentedly among the vinegar droplets. An emulsifier is like a third link in the chain, a mediator attracting and uniting two formerly hostile parties. Mustard often plays the role of emulsifier in a vinaigrette, while in a mayonnaise, the egg yolk itself has some emulsifying qualities.
Emulsions have been my enemy for some time. Seeing a creamy nut-dressing turn into a gloppy oily mess half an hour before a dinner party has driven me to near-tears, and once Anthony and I were both so engaged with whisking a mayo that we failed to notice Laika behind us delicately putting her face into a cake until its surface was cratered like the moon.
My rules of thumb for making sauces — throw in everything at the same time, substitute or leave out whatever you don’t have, and if something is too thick just thin it with water — fall apart, literally, with emulsions. I was always in too much of a hurry and too deep of distress to think about why, but reading Samin’s explanation of what’s going on helped me to make them better. Whisking, I imagine striking those molecules to blast them apart, so that they can reform into something new.