The homepage for my cooking knowledge.

Inputs and outputs

The cooking content I want to produce is:

1. Recipes I really enjoy, that someday I'll put in my wonderful recipe app. To make this, I need to track:
   1. Recipes I'm pretty intent on making in recipes/ with the quickadd template. Techniques can go in too with technique tag. There are various tags like dessert, indulgent which I can make up as I go along.
   2. Amazing meals I've had that I don't necessarily want to try making, which can serve as inspiration. I'll save these as Banging meal.
   3. Ideas I've had for making stuff, which I can do with idea.
2. A guide for my cooking knowledge, which lives in the Cooking page (this one!).

Questions

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Ideas

block:("[[Cooking]]" #idea)

Inspiration

• Banana pastry sesame egg tarts
• Putting raw sugar on breakfast egg to mimic the toastie you had at Gwangjang market
• Cook fish with butter, almost burning the fish, because the butter will caramelise. You don’t need sauce because it slaps. Rec’d by French will and his grandma who sold fish
• Cardamom and espresso bring out the flavour of chocolate.
• Smoothie recipes as icecream.

Wisdom

General

• "Salt at every step of the process". Or rather, add salt from earlier in the cooking process. It can break down food to distribute flavour, but this requires time
• The brown stuff in the pan is the most delicious part. Cook on stainless steel or carbon steel so that you can scrape the pan without fear of getting teflon cancer. Use a little water, soy sauce, wine, vinegar or your liquid of choice to scrape the brown stuff back into the sauce.

Dietaries

• #funfact Kombu is often used to cook beans because it contains alpha-galactosidase, an enzyme that breaks down raffinose, the indigestible carbohydrate (galacto-oligosaccharide, or GOS) in beans responsible for flatulence. This might make it invaluable in FODMAP diets. Source

Substitutions

• Savoury
  • Worcestershire is a GF sub for soy, but it often contains seafood. You can sub soy:miso paste at a volume ratio of 1:2.
  • Soy sauce : miso is 1:2 by volume. Miso is GF and practically always vegan.
• Banana in smoothies can be swapped for cauliflower or zucchini.

Oil

• Oils are a processed food, and should be used in moderation. If you're regularly sauteing your food, your bad cholesterol levels will still be high enough to cause heart disease.
• Always ventilate when cooking with oils. Pay attention to the smoke point of oils if you're going to use them. Never put olive oil on high heat. Even hot oil fumes are toxic.
• Over-blending olive oil leads to a bitter texture and less stable emulsification.

You see, extra-virgin olive oil droplets are composed of many tiny fragments, many of which are bound tightly together, preventing our taste buds from picking them up. Whip the olive oil with enough vigor by, say, using a food processor or blender, and you end up shearing those bitter-tasting fragments apart from each other. The result is a mayonnaise with a markedly bitter flavor. Not only that, but these tiny fragments actually decrease the efficacy of emulsifiers like mustard and lecithin, making your sauce more likely to break.

• Blooming is the process of deep-frying stuff to rip the flavours out of them. In general, the order of ingredients for cooking anything with oil is: add oil on high heat; add whole spices (eg curry leaves, mustard seeds, dried chilli) until fragrant or seeds popping; add chopped onions; add dried powdered spices; add fresh chillies; add aromatics (eg ginger, garlic, lemongrass); remove from heat and add chilli powder/flakes.

Tadka (or loosely, the art of flavouring oil). Stolen from Nik Sharma at SeriousEats:

While every tadka is unique, here is a rough guide to how I approach making it; other cooks may have slightly different methods. Generally speaking, the process is as follows:

1. Heat the oil in a small saucepan over a medium or medium-low flame. Test the temperature of the oil to make sure it is hot enough by dropping in one or two whole spice seeds (based on what you’re using) such as cumin, coriander, or mustard. The spices will sizzle immediately if the oil is sufficiently hot.
2. Add the rest of the whole spices, including larger pieces like cinnamon sticks, and small beans or lentils.
3. If using onions, shallots, and ginger, and if you want them browned and crisp, add them now.
4. If using asafetida (hing) or other ground spices, add them next. They will be fragrant and lightly toasted within a few seconds.
5. Dried chilies can burn easily so, to reduce the risk, I add whole dried chilies after adding the ground spices.
6. If using fresh green chili, add it here, but take care as it may cause the oil to sputter. If using onions, shallots, and ginger, and you do not want them browned or crisp and want to retain a fresher flavor, add them now. This is also a good moment to add curry leaves or bay leaves
7. If using garlic, add it now, because garlic cooks very quickly.
8. At this point, remove the saucepan from the stove and, if using, add ground chili powder or chili flakes. The residual heat is enough to extract their flavor.

Vegetables

• Overcooking cabbage leads to a pungent, unpleasant texture due to hydrogen sulfide. In general, take caution not to overcook anything containing sulfur.
• Increase sweetness and caramelisation of sweet potatoes by freezing them first, and choosing varieties with higher moisture content like purple-flesh ones. Source
• Pre-freeze vegetables (especially thin ones like beans) to soften them up by "cryo-emacerating" them with ice crystals. This will reduce cooking time while leaving their colour and fresh flavour intact.

Fruits

• You can "cryo-macerate" fruits like pears by freezing and thawing them repeatedly. Repeatedly forming ice crystals tears apart the cells inside, releasing delicious flavour compounds. Traditional Chinese cooking does this with pears (as they freeze to store in the winter), but you could try it for any fruits. This is an alternative to cooking-down fruits (like for jams and desserts), or can give you a head start.

Legumes

• Freeze tofu in order to increase its absorption, chewiness and bounciness (aesthetic). The ice crystals tear holds in the coagulated protein structure. Hand-squeeze or press the tofu after defrosting to remove water and make it extra absorbent. Source

Homemade pasta. Sauce

• Good pasta is characterised by its moisture, fat, emulsification (binding) and protein structure (often with gluten).
• Eggs provide fat, moisture and emulsification, which can be respectively substituted with water, oil and emulsifiers like flax seed, chia seeds, mustard seeds, (corn) starch, etc.

Emulsion.

• There are two types of emulsion; physical (ie adding viscosity with honey or low-moisture like in basil), and chemical (mustard, lecithin).

Physical emulsifiers work by adding viscosity to the liquids. The more viscous a liquid, the less it flows, and the more slowly individual oil and water droplets come into contact with each other, helping the whole thing stay in suspension. Honey, sugar, pounded nuts, crushed basil in pesto—these are all physical emulsifiers that offer varying degrees of added viscosity.
Chemical emulsifiers work differently. These are molecules that have one hydrophobic (oil-loving) and one hydrophilic (water-loving) end. Like a finger trap, they force oil and water to get along. This is how lecithin, a chemical found in abundance in egg yolks, works.

Freezing

• Creates ice crystals which tear through the structure of the food. Results in moisture loss and softening. Great for french fries.

Potatoes (and starchy vegetables)

• Boiling with acidity prevents starch cells from bursting, resulting in firmer pieces (ie for french fries).
• Meanwhile, boiling with alkalinity encourages starch cells to burst, resulting in softer, fuzzier pieces with more surface area (ie for making crunchy roast potatoes).

Marinating

• Use a mass ratio of 1:4 for marinade:meat.
• A simple marinade blueprint is a volume ratio of 1:3:any for acid:fat:seasonings, or a mass ratio of 1:5:any.
• A more advanced marinade blueprint contains: salt to tenderise meat, soy sauce and sugar to aid Maillard, (high smoke-point) oil to distribute fat soluble aromatic compounds, cornstarch to insulate meat from high heat (preventing burning), and aromatics like pepper and wine.
  • For 2kg sliced/diced meat, the volume ratio is 1:2:2:4:4:4:8 of pepper:salt:sugar:wine:soy sauce:cornstarch:oil. Or alternatively stated, 1 tsp pepper, 2 tsp salt and sugar, 1.3 tbsp wine and soy and cornstarch, 2.7 tbsp oil.
• Marinate for the right amount of time what is it. Too long can make meat tight, but just the right amount will tenderise.