Energy Transfer
On Tuesday we made oatmeal. It didn’t exactly feel like a culinary school sort of dish, but our teacher Chef Celine wanted to demonstrate what happens to starches when they are added to boiling water vs brought up to boiling in cold water. What happened was that when the water was already boiling, the outsides of the oats immediately gelatinized and the oats remained relatively distinct units floating in water. When the water and oats were brought up to temperature together, the oats absorbed more water which then caused them to burst and release more of their starch into the water. The oatmeal became thick and porridge-like — a completely different consistency from the hot-water-oatmeal. It also tasted incredible, but that may be because it was 6pm and I’d been on my feet and hadn’t eaten since noon.
This week we’ve been studying heat transfer through a variety of cooking methods — poaching, steaming, boiling, sweating, sautéing, caramelizing, braising, stewing, pan-frying, deep-frying, and stir-frying. I’ve done all these things in my home kitchen. The difference in class is first of all the kitchen — the equipment we use for every little job is very unlike at home (sheet pans and hotel pans galore, tongs in hand always to push around food or remove a hot lid). There are also so many protocols in the kitchen that make sense from an efficiency or safety perspective — we set up a “side station” next to the stove with a sheet pan, cooling rack, and bain marie for utensils. If we have to carry knives through the kitchen we put them on a sheet pan first and carry that. I think of all the rules as defensive organization mainly for others but also yourself in a moment of absentmindedness. As for the actual cooking methods, they’re the same that I knew but with more precision. We pay attention to the way bubbles form for poaching (tiny, on the edges), simmering (just barely across the whole surface of the water) and boiling (big juicy bubbles). I learned that “pan-frying” technically means to fill a pan with oil so that it reaches halfway up the thing you’re cooking, so that when you flip it, there won’t be a middle-section that’s either uncooked or double-cooked.
Our new teacher Celine Beitchman is all rules and efficiency to Elliot’s looseness and meandering stories. She squeezes a huge amount into every class, so she’s curt in her notes and warnings to us. Underneath all that seems to be an enormous amount of care and respect for our time in class with her. She’s also a certified nutritionist, so I’ll be happy to have someone to talk about food as medicine in a more scientific language rather than traditional Chinese medicine or Ayurvedic energetics.
I wrote the end of this newsletter in an off-the-grid cabin in the woods where I’ve been spending the weekend. I think part of what they’re teaching me in school is to be more careful of my surroundings — the people around me, which things are clean or dirty or hot or sharp, and how to take care of it all and myself so that we’ll be able to perform just as well the next day. I’ve noticed small differences in the way I take care around the cabin this weekend. I cook and clean better because I’m paying more attention to what I’m doing. My concerns are different here, like making sure I’m not leaving food scraps where wildlife can get them, not mixing up drinking water with washing water, and locating my headlamp if I’m going to cook as the sun goes down. The principles are the same though. When we notice more of the details of a task, then we do it better, with fewer surprises, and that lets us stay calm while we work.
What I’m cooking
Artichoke-almond dip
We made this dip in class, as part of learning about steaming artichokes and blanching almonds, and then I went home and added some miso and lemon juice to give it more flavor.
Ingredients
One whole artichoke
1/2 cup of raw almonds
Olive oil (ours was garlic-infused)
Pinch of salt
~1 tablespoon white miso
Half a lemon
Serve with crudités (carrot sticks, snap peas, sliced cucumber, or broccoli florets blanched for 30 seconds and then shocked in an ice bath) or nice bread
Method
To prepare the artichoke, chop off about 1/3 of the top (see picture). Rub that cut side with lemon juice to prevent discoloration. Pull off a couple of the tough outer leaves and then use a spoon to remove some of the center — make sure all the fibrous hairy bits are out and you’ve reached the solid middle beneath all the leaves. Slice off the stem. Get about an inch of water boiling and place a steamer basket inside it, then put the artichoke in stem-side down. Cover and steam for about 10-15 minutes, checking for doneness by poking the stem with a toothpick. When it’s cooked through, remove all the outer leaves. You can dip them in a mixture of melted butter and lemon juice and pull off the meat with your teeth, so don’t throw them away! But for the dip, all you’ll need is the cooked heart of the artichoke.
To blanch almonds, just bring a pot of water up to boiling and then toss in the almonds. Prepare an ice-water bath to put them into. They may only need a few minutes before you start to notice their skin wrinkling up. You can always test by removing an almond to the ice-water and then seeing if it’s easy for you to pop it out of its skin. If it is, then do the same for all the almonds.
Making the dip itself is very easy, just blend together the artichoke and almonds with a couple dollops of olive oil, a pinch of salt, a spoonful of miso, and a squeeze of lemon. Use less of everything to start and keep tasting to find the right amount (I added too much miso to mine).
We made a dinner out of dipping broccoli and a couple bread slices into this dip plus some muhammara we had.