Читать книгу Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat - Samin Nosrat - Страница 13
ОглавлениеJust after I began cooking at Chez Panisse, the chefs held a contest to see which employee could come up with the best tomato sauce recipe. There was only one rule: we had to use ingredients readily available in the restaurant’s kitchen. The prize was five hundred dollars in cash and an acknowledgement on the menu each time the recipe would be used . . . forever.
As a total novice, I was too intimidated to enter, but it seemed like everyone else— from the maître d’ to other waiters, porters, and, of course, the cooks—wanted to try.
Dozens of entrants brought in their sauces for a blind tasting by a team of “impartial judges” (i.e., the chefs and Alice). Some sauces were seasoned with dried oregano, others fresh marjoram. Some entrants crushed their canned tomatoes by hand while others painstakingly seeded and diced them. Others added chilli flakes while still others channelled their inner nonnas and puréed their sauces, pomarola-style. It was tomato mayhem and we were all atwitter, waiting to hear who would be the winner.
At one point, one of the chefs came into the kitchen to get a glass of water. We asked him how it was going. I’ll never forget what he said.
“There are a lot of great entries. So many, in fact, that it’s hard to narrow them down. But Alice’s palate is so sensitive she can’t ignore that some of the best versions were made with rancid olive oil.”
Alice couldn’t understand why everyone hadn’t used the high-quality olive oil we cooked with at the restaurant, especially when it was always available to employees to buy at cost.
I was shocked. Never before had it occurred to me that olive oil would have much effect on the flavour of a dish, much less one as piquant as tomato sauce. This was my first glimpse of understanding that as a foundational ingredient, the flavour of olive oil, and indeed any fat we choose to cook with, dramatically alters our perception of the entire dish. Just as an onion cooked in butter tastes different from an onion cooked in olive oil, an onion cooked in good olive oil tastes different—and in this case better—than one cooked in a poorer quality oil.
My friend Mike, another young cook, ended up winning the contest. His recipe was so complicated I can hardly remember it all these years later. But I’ll never forget the lesson I learned that day: food can only ever be as delicious as the fat with which it’s cooked.
While I was taught to appreciate the flavours of various olive oils at Chez Panisse, it wasn’t until I worked in Italy that I saw fat as an important and versatile element of cooking on its own, rather than simply a cooking medium.
During the olive harvest, or raccolta, I made a pilgrimage to Tenuta di Capezzana, the producer of the most exquisite olive oil I’d ever tasted. Standing in the frantoio, I watched rapt as the day’s olive harvest was transformed into a yellow-green elixir so bright it seemed to illuminate the dark Tuscan night. The oil’s flavour was as astonishing as its colour—peppery, almost acidic, in a way I never imagined a fat could be.
The following autumn I was in Liguria, a coastal province, during the raccolta. Olio nuovo pressed on the shores of the Mediterranean was wholly different: this oil was buttery, low in acid, and so rich I wanted to swallow spoonfuls of it. I learned that where olive oil comes from has a huge effect on how it tastes—oil from hot, dry hilly areas is spicy, while oil from coastal climates with milder weather is correspondingly milder in flavour. After tasting the oils I could see how a peppery oil would overwhelm a delicate preparation such as fish tartare, while the more subtle flavour of a coastal oil might not be able to stand up to the bold flavours of a Tuscan bistecca served with bitter greens.
At Zibibbo, Benedetta Vitali’s Florentine trattoria, we used peppery Tuscan extra-virgin olive oil more liberally than any other ingredient. We used it to make salad dressings. We used it to drench the dough for the focaccia we baked each morning. We used it to brown soffritto, the aromatic base of onions, carrots, and celery at the foundation of all of our long-cooked foods. We used it to deep-fry everything from squid to squash blossoms to bomboloni, the cream-filled doughnuts I ate with gusto every Saturday morning. Tuscan olive oil defined the flavour of our cooking; our food tasted delicious because our olive oil was delicious.
As I travelled throughout Italy, I saw how fat determines the particular flavours of regional cooking. In the North, where pastures and the dairy cattle they sustain are abundant, cooks use butter, cream, and rich cheeses readily in dishes such as polenta, tagliatelle Bolognese, and risotto. In the South and on the coasts, where olive trees flourish, olive oil is used in everything from seafood dishes to pastas and even desserts such as olive oil gelato. Because pigs can be raised in just about any climate, though, one thing unites the diverse regional Italian cuisines: pork fat.
As I immersed myself in the culture and cuisine of Italy, one thing became clear: Italians’ remarkable relationship to fat is essential to why their food tastes so good. Fat, then, I realised, is the second element of good cooking.
WHAT IS FAT?
The best way to appreciate the value of fat in the kitchen is to try to imagine cooking without it. What would vinaigrette be without olive oil, sausage without pork fat, a baked potato without sour cream, a croissant without butter? Pointless, that’s what. Without the flavours and textures that fat makes possible, food would be immeasurably less pleasurable to eat. In other words, fat is essential for achieving the full spectrum of flavours and textures of good cooking.
Besides being one of the four basic elements of good cooking, fat is also one of the four elemental building blocks of all foods, along with water, protein, and carbohydrates. While it’s commonly believed that fat, much like salt, is universally unhealthy, both elements are essential to human survival. Fat serves as a crucial backup energy source, a way to store energy for future use, and plays a role in nutrient absorption and essential metabolic functions, such as brain growth. Unless you’ve been directed by your doctor to strictly reduce your fat consumption, you don’t need to worry—there’s nothing unhealthy about cooking with moderate amounts of fat (especially if you favour healthy plant- and fish-based fats). As with salt, my aim isn’t so much to get you to use more fat as it is to teach you how to make better use of it in your cooking.
In contrast to salt, fat takes on many forms and is derived from many sources (see Sources of Fat, here). While salt is a mineral, used primarily to enhance flavour, fat plays three distinct roles in the kitchen: as a main ingredient, as a cooking medium, and, like salt, as seasoning. The same type of fat can play different roles in your cooking, depending on how it is used. The first step in choosing a fat to use is to identify the primary role it will play in a dish.
Used as a main ingredient, fat will significantly affect a dish. Often, it’s a source both of rich flavour and of a particular desired texture. For example, fat ground into a burger will render as it cooks, basting the meat from within and contributing to juciness. Butter inhibits the proteins in flour from developing, yielding tender and flaky textures in a pastry. Olive oil contributes both a light, grassy flavour and a rich texture to pesto. The amount of cream and egg yolks in an ice cream determines just how smooth and decadent it’ll be (hint: the more cream and eggs, the creamier the result).
The role fat plays as a cooking medium is perhaps its most impressive and unique. Cooking fats can be heated to extreme temperatures, allowing the surface temperature of foods cooked in them to climb to astonishing heights as well. In the process, these foods become golden brown and develop the crisp crusts that so please our palates. Any fat you heat to cook food can be described as a medium, whether it’s the peanut oil in which you fry chicken, the butter you use to sauté spring vegetables, or the olive oil in which you poach tuna.
Certain fats can also be used as seasoning to adjust flavour or enrich the texture of a dish just before serving: a few drops of toasted sesame oil will deepen the flavours in a bowl of rice, a dollop of sour cream will offer silky richness to a cup of soup, a little mayonnaise spread on a BLT will increase its succulence, and a smear of cultured butter on a piece of crusty bread will add untold richness.
To determine which role fat is playing in a dish, ask yourself these questions:
• Will this fat bind various ingredients together? If so, this is a main ingredient.
• Does this fat play a textural role? For flaky, creamy, and light textures, fat plays the role of main ingredient, while for crisp textures, it’s a cooking medium. For tender textures, fat can play either role.
• Will this fat be heated and used to cook the food? If so, this is a cooking medium.
• Does this fat play a flavour role? If it’s added at the outset, it’s a main ingredient. If it’s used to adjust flavour or texture at the end of cooking the dish as a garnish, it’s a seasoning.
Once you’ve identified which role fat will play in a dish, you’ll be better equipped to choose which fat to use, and how to cook food that will result in the taste and texture you’re after.
FAT AND FLAVOUR
Fat’s Effect on Flavour
Put simply, fat carries flavour. While certain fats have their own distinct flavours, any fat can convey aromas—and enhance flavours—to our palates that would otherwise go unnoticed. Fat coats the tongue, allowing various aromatic compounds to stay in contact with our taste buds for longer periods of time, intensifying and prolonging our experience of various flavours. Peel and slice two cloves of garlic. Gently sizzle one clove in a couple of tablespoons of water, and the other in the same amount of olive oil. Taste a few drops of each liquid. You’ll have a much more powerful impression of the garlic flavour in oil. Take advantage of this capability to intensify and circulate flavour by adding aromatics directly into the cooking fat. When baking, add vanilla extract and other flavourings directly into the butter or egg yolks for the same result.
Fat enhances flavour in another extraordinary way. Because cooking fats can withstand temperatures well beyond the boiling point of water (100°C at sea level), they perform a crucial task that water cannot—the facilitation of surface browning, which typically does not begin at temperatures below 110°C. In some foods, browning will introduce entirely new flavours, including nuttiness, sweetness, meatiness, earthiness, and savouriness (umami). Imagine the difference in flavour between a poached chicken breast and one browned on the stove in a little olive oil, and the incalculable value of this attribute will be clear.
The Flavours of Fat
Different fats have different flavours. To select the right fat, get to know how each fat tastes, and in which cuisines it’s commonly used.
Olive Oil
Olive oil is a staple in Mediterranean cooking, so make it your default fat when cooking foods inspired by Italian, Spanish, Greek, Turkish, North African, and Middle Eastern cuisines. It shines as a medium for everything from soups and pastas to braises, roasted meats, and vegetables. Use it as a main ingredient in mayonnaise, vinaigrette, and all manner of condiments from Herb Salsa to chilli oil. Drizzle it over beef carpaccio or baked ricotta as a seasoning.
Your food will taste good if you start with a good tasting olive oil, but choosing the right one can be daunting. At my local market alone, there are two dozen brands of extra-virgin olive oil on display. Then there are all the virgin, pure, and flavoured oils. Early in my cooking career, as I approached these aisles, I often found myself overwhelmed by choices: virgin or extra-virgin? Italy or France? Organic or not? Is that olive oil on sale any good? Why is one brand £25 for 750 millilitres while another is £7.50 for a litre?
As with wine, taste, not price, is the best guide to choosing an olive oil. This might require an initial leap of faith, but the only way to learn the vocabulary of olive oil is to taste, and pay attention. Descriptors like fruity, pungent, spicy, and bright might seem confusing at first, but a good olive oil, like a good wine, is multidimensional. If you taste something expensive but don’t like it, then it’s not for you. If you find a ten-dollar bottle that’s delicious, then you’ve scored!
While it’s a challenge to explain what good olive oil tastes like, it’s fairly simple to describe a bad one—bitter, overwhelmingly spicy, dirty, rancid—all deal-breakers.
Colour has little to do with the quality of olive oil, and it offers no clues to whether an olive oil is rancid. Instead, use your nose and palate: does the olive oil smell like a box of crayons, candle wax, or the oil floating on top of an old jar of peanut butter? If so, it’s rancid. The sad truth is that most Americans, accustomed to the taste of rancid olive oil, actually prefer it. And so, most of the huge olive oil producers are happy to sell to us what more discerning buyers would reject.
Olive oil is produced seasonally. Look for a production date, typically in November, on the label when you purchase a bottle to ensure you are buying a current pressing. It will go rancid about twelve to fourteen months after it’s been pressed, so don’t save it for a special occasion, thinking it will improve over time like a fine wine! (In this way, olive oil is nothing like wine.)
As with salt, there are various categories of olive oils—everyday oils, finishing oils, and flavoured oils. Use everyday olive oils for general cookery and finishing olive oils for applications where you really want to let the flavour of the olive oil stand out: in salad dressings, spooned over fish tartare, in herb salsas, or in olive oil cakes. Purchase and use flavoured olive oils with caution. Flavourings are often added to mask the taste of low-quality olive oils, so I generally recommend staying away from them. But there is an exception: olive oils marked agrumato are made using a traditional technique of milling whole citrus fruit with the olives at the time of the first press. At Bi-Rite Creamery in San Francisco, one of the most popular sundaes features bergamot agrumato drizzled over chocolate ice cream. And it is delicious!
It can be difficult to find a good, affordable everyday olive oil. My standbys include the extra-virgin oils from Seka Hills, Katz, and California Olive Ranch. Another good everyday oil is the Kirkland Signature Organic Extra Virgin Oil from Costco, which regularly scores well on independently administered quality analyses. In their absence, look for oils that are produced from 100 percent Californian or Italian olives (as opposed to those with labels that simply read “Made in Italy,” “Packed in Italy,” or “Bottled in Italy,” which imply that the oil is pressed in Italy from olives whose provenance cannot be traced or guaranteed). The production date should always be clearly marked on the label.
If you can’t track down a good, affordable everyday olive oil, instead of using a lower-quality one, make your own blend of good olive oil and a neutral-tasting cold-pressed grapeseed or canola oil. Save the pure stuff and use it as a finishing olive oil for salads and condiments.
Once you find an olive oil you love, take good care of it. Constant temperature fluctuations from a nearby stove or daily brushes with the sun’s rays will encourage olive oil to go rancid, so store it somewhere reliably cool and dark. If you can’t keep it in a dark place, store olive oil in a dark glass bottle or metal can to keep light out.
Butter
Butter is a common cooking fat in regions with climates that support pasture for grazing cows throughout the US and Canada, the UK and Ireland, Scandinavia, Western Europe including northern Italy, and Russia, Morocco, and India.
One of the most versatile fats, butter can be manipulated into several forms and used as either a cooking medium, main ingredient, or seasoning. In its natural state, butter is available salted and unsalted, and cultured. Salted and tangy cultured butters are best as is, spread on warm toast, or served with radishes and sea salt as an hors d’oeuvre. There is no way to know exactly how much salt is in any one particular brand of salted butter, so use unsalted butter when cooking and baking, and add your own salt to taste.
Chilled or at room temperature, unsalted butter can be worked into doughs and batters as a main ingredient to lend its rich dairy flavour to baked goods and produce a variety of luxurious textures, from flaky to tender to light. Unlike oil, butter is not pure fat—it also contains water, milk protein, and whey solids, which provide much of its flavour. Gently heat unsalted butter until those solids brown and you get brown butter, which is nutty and sweet. Brown butter is a classic flavour in French and northern Italian cooking—particularly apt for pairing with hazelnuts, winter squash and sage, as I like to do in Autumn Panzanella, which is dressed with a Brown Butter Vinaigrette.
Melt unsalted butter gently over sustained low heat to clarify it. The whey proteins will rise to the top of the clear, yellow fat, and other milk proteins will fall to the bottom. The water will evaporate, leaving behind 100 percent fat. Skim the whey solids and save them to toss with fettuccine—the buttery flavour is an ideal complement to the eggy noodles, especially if you top the dish with grated Parmesan and freshly ground black pepper. Since the proteins can sneak through even the finest cheesecloth, take care to leave them undisturbed at the bottom of the pot. Carefully strain the rest of the butter through cheesecloth to yield clarified butter, which is an excellent medium for high-heat cooking. I love using clarified butter for frying potato cakes—with the solids removed, the butter doesn’t burn, and the potatoes take on all of that buttery goodness. Indian ghee is simply clarified butter that’s been cooked at a higher temperature, allowing the milk solids to brown and lend the finished fat a sweeter flavour. Smen, used to fluff Moroccan couscous, is clarified butter that has been buried underground for up to seven years to develop a cheesy taste.
Seed and Nut Oils
Almost every culture relies on a neutral-tasting seed or nut oil, because cooks don’t always want fat to flavour a dish. Peanut oil, expeller-pressed canola oil, and grapeseed oil are all good choices as cooking fats precisely because they don’t taste like anything. Since they have high smoke points, these oils can also withstand the high temperatures required to crisp and brown foods.
Spreading a rumour of tropical flavour to any dish where it’s used, coconut oil tastes particularly good in granola, or as the cooking fat for roasted root vegetables. Coconut oil is also the rare vegetable oil that’s solid at room temperature. Read on to learn how solid fat is a boon for making flaky pastries, and use coconut oil to make a pie crust the next time your lactose-intolerant friend comes over for dinner. (Cook’s tip: Both skin and hair readily absorb coconut oil, so it makes for a fantastic luxury treatment whenever you’re feeling dry!)
Speciality seed and nut oils with vibrant flavours can be used as seasonings. Fry leftover rice in toasted sesame oil with an egg and kimchee for a Korean-inspired snack. A little toasted hazelnut oil in a vinaigrette will amplify a simple rocket and hazelnut salad with an echo of nuttiness. Garnish pumpkin soup with a Herb Salsa pumped up with toasted pumpkin seeds and a drizzle of pumpkin seed oil to incorporate multiple dimensions of a single ingredient.
Animal Fats
All meat-eating cultures make use of animal fats, which can be incorporated into food as a main ingredient, cooking medium, or seasoning depending on its form. Most aromatic molecules are repelled by water, so in meat they’re predominantly found in an animal’s fat. As a result, any animal’s fat will taste much more distinctly of that animal than its lean meat—beef fat tastes beefier than steak, pork fat tastes porkier than pork, chicken fat tastes more chickeny than chicken, and so on.
Beef
When solid, it’s called suet. Liquid, it’s called tallow. Beef fat is a crucial component in hamburgers and hot dogs, lending beefy flavour and enhancing moistness. Without suet, or another added fat, a hamburger would be dry, crumbly, and tasteless. Tallow is often used for frying french fries and cooking Yorkshire pudding.
Pork
When solid, it’s called pork fat. Liquid, it’s called lard. Pork fat is an important addition to sausages and terrines, providing both flavour and richness. Use solid pork fat for barding and larding, two hilariously named terms for supplementing lean meats with solid fat to keep them from drying out. Barding is the term for covering lean meat with slices of pork belly— either smoked and called bacon, cured and called pancetta, or left unadulterated— to protect it from the dry heat of roasting, while larding refers to the act of threading pieces of fat through a lean piece of meat with a long, thick needle. Both processes add richness and flavour.
Since it has a high smoke point, lard is a terrific cooking medium and is commonly used in Mexico, the American South, southern Italy, and the northern Philippines. It can also be used as an ingredient in doughs, though it should be used with care, because while it makes for a perfectly flaky empanada dough, its distinctly porky taste may not always be desirable in your blueberry pie!
Chicken, Duck, and Goose
These fats are only used in their liquid forms as cooking media. Schmaltz—or rendered chicken fat—is a traditional ingredient in the Jewish kitchen. I love sizzling rice in it to lend it some chickeny flavour. Save duck or goose fat that renders when roasting a bird, strain it, and use it to fry potatoes or root vegetables. Few things are tastier than potatoes fried in duck fat.
Lamb
Also called suet, it’s generally not rendered, but it is an important ingredient in lamb sausages such as merguez in countries where pork is not consumed.
In general, fat makes meat taste good. We prize—even grade—steaks based on how marbled, or fatty, they are. There’s also the fat that we don’t love to eat—the rubbery, chewy lump at the top of a chicken breast, or the bit of brisket fat that always ends up on the edge of the plate. Why do we value some animal fats and eschew others?
When four-legged animals are fattened up with lots of calories, the cuts of meat from the centre of the animal receive the most flavour benefits. Some fat ends up layered between groups of muscles, or directly under their skin, as in the cap of fat on the outside of a pork loin or prime rib. Some fat ends up within a muscle. This is the more prized kind of fat—what we call marbling when we look at a steak. As a well-marbled steak cooks, the fat will melt, making the meat juicier from within. And since fat carries flavour, many of the chemical compounds that make any one kind of meat taste like itself (beef like beef, pork like pork, chicken like chicken) are more concentrated in fat than in lean muscle. That’s why, for example, chicken thighs taste more chickeny than the leaner breast meat.
Though lumps of fat might not be so tasty on the plate, you can remove them from the meat and melt them down, then use the rendered fat as a cooking medium. The distinct flavours of animal fats lend themselves well to being used in dishes where the goal is to evoke a certain meatiness: matzoh balls fortified with schmaltz will amplify a chicken soup’s chickeniness, and hash browns cooked in bacon fat will lend breakfast a smoky, rich flavour even if no meat makes it onto the plate. A little animal fat will go a long way towards enriching and flavouring even the simplest foods.
How to use the Flavour Maps
Flip this page open. Inside you’ll find one of the three flavour maps in this book. Use it to navigate through the flavours of the world. Each level of the wheel contains a layer of information: use the two inner layers to guide you to your cuisine of choice, and then refer to the outermost layer to choose the right fat for cooking foods from that cuisine.
Fats of the World
Just as I’d discovered in Italy, cuisines are distinguished by their fats. Since fat is the foundation of so many dishes, choose culturally appropriate fats to flavour food from within. Use the wrong fat, and food will never taste right, no matter how carefully you use other seasonings.
Don’t use olive oil when cooking Vietnamese food, or smoky bacon fat when making Indian food. Instead, refer to this flavour wheel to guide your decision making as you cook foods from around the world. Sauté Garlicky Green Beans in butter to serve with a French-inspired meal, in ghee to serve alongside Indian rice and lentils, or with a splash of sesame oil to serve with Glazed Five-Spice Chicken.
HOW FAT WORKS
Which fats we use primarily affect flavour, but how we use them will determine texture, which is just as important in good cooking. Varied textures excite our palates. By transforming foods from soft and moist to crisp and crunchy, we introduce new textures and make the experience of eating more amusing, surprising, and delicious. Depending on how we use fats, we can achieve any one of five distinct textures in our food: Crisp, Creamy, Flaky, Tender, and Light.
Crisp
Humans love crisp and crunchy foods. According to chef Mario Batali, the word crispy sells more food than almost any other adjective. Crisp foods stoke our appetites by conjuring up past experiences of foods with pleasing aromas, tastes, and sounds. Just think of fried chicken, a version of which you’ll encounter in practically any country around the world. Few moments in a meal can rival that first bite of chicken, fried so expertly that the skin shatters the moment your teeth sink into it. Steam ripe with the mouthwatering aromas of that crisp batter; a loud, attention-grabbing crunch; and the comforting flavours of fried chicken all emerge simultaneously to deliver that universal experience of deliciousness.
For food to become crisp, the water trapped in its cells must evaporate. Water evaporates as it boils, so the surface temperature of the ingredient must climb beyond the boiling point of 100°C.
To achieve this effect on the entire surface of the food, it needs to be in direct, even contact with a heat source, such as a pan at temperatures well beyond water’s boiling point. But no food is perfectly smooth, and at the microscopic level, most pans aren’t either. In order to get even contact between the food and the pan, we need a medium: fat. Cooking fats can be heated to 176°C and beyond before beginning to smoke, so they are ideal mediums for developing the crisp, golden crusts that delight our palates so much. Cooking methods where fat is heated to achieve crispness include searing, sautéing, pan-, shallow-, and deep-frying. (A bonus: using enough fat to create even surface contact will prevent food from sticking to the pan.)
As with salt, I encourage you to abandon any fear of fat, for knowing how to use fat properly may lead you to use less of it. The best way to know how much fat to use is to pay attention to certain sensory cues. Some ingredients, such as aubergines and mushrooms, act like sponges, quickly absorbing fat and then cooking dry against the hot metal. Using too little fat in a pan, or letting the fat be absorbed and neglecting to add more, will result in dark, bitter blisters on the surface of the food. Other ingredients, such as pork chops or chicken thighs, will release their own fat as they cook; walk away from a pan of sizzling bacon for a few minutes and you’ll return to see the strips practically submerged in their own fat.
Let your eyes, ears, and taste buds guide you in how much fat to use. Recipes can be a useful starting point, but conditions vary from kitchen to kitchen, depending on the tools available to you. Say a recipe asks you to cook two diced onions in two tablespoons of olive oil. In a small pan that might be enough to coat the bottom but in a larger pan with greater surface area it probably isn’t. Instead of just following a recipe, use your common sense, too. For example, make sure that the bottom of the pan is coated with fat when sautéing, or that oil comes halfway up the sides of the food when shallow-frying.
Food cooked in too much fat is no more appetising than its inverse. Few things can retroactively ruin a meal like a puddle of grease left on an otherwise empty plate. Drain fried foods—even pan- or shallow-fried foods—with a quick dab on a clean dish towel or paper napkin before serving. And lift sautéed foods out of the pan with a slotted spoon or tongs, rather than tilting them out onto a plate, to leave the excess fat behind.
While you’re cooking, if you notice you’ve used more fat than you’d intended, you can tip the excess out of the pan, taking care to wipe its outer edge where fat may have dripped, to prevent a flare-up. Just do it carefully so you don’t burn yourself. If the pan is too heavy or hot, then be smart: take the food out and use tongs to place it on a plate, then tip some of the fat out, replace the food, and continue cooking. It’s not worth a burn or a grease spill to avoid washing an extra dish.
Heating Oil Properly
Preheat the pan to reduce the amount of time fat spends in direct contact with the hot metal, minimising opportunity for it to deteriorate. As oil is heated, it breaks down, leading to flavour degradation and the release of toxic chemicals. Food is also more likely to stick to a cold pan—another reason to preheat. But exceptions to the preheating rule exist: butter and garlic. Both will burn if the pan is too hot, so you must heat them gently. In all other cooking, preheat the pan and then add the fat, letting it too heat up before adding any other ingredients.
The pan should be hot enough so that oil immediately ripples and shimmers when added. Various metals conduct heat at different rates, so there’s no set amount of time to recommend; instead, test the pan with a drop of water. If it crackles a little bit before evaporating—it doesn’t have to be a violent sound—then the pan is ready. A general clue that both the pan and fat are hot enough is the sound of a delicate sizzle upon addition of the food. If you add food too early and don’t get that sizzle, just take the food out, let the pan heat up sufficiently, and put it back in to ensure it doesn’t stick or overcook before it browns.
Rendering
Intermuscular and subcutaneous fats—the lumpy bits between the muscles and the layer of fat just beneath the skin—can be cut into small pieces, placed in a pan with a minimal amount of water, and rendered, or cooked over gentle heat until all the water has evaporated. This process transforms solid fat into a liquid that can be used as a cooking medium. The next time you roast a duck, trim all of its excess fat before cooking and render it. Strain it into a glass jar and store it in the fridge. It’ll keep for up to six months. Save it to make Chicken Confit.
While fat in meat is a great boon to flavour, it can also prevent meat from crisping. Even when the aim is not to render fat to use as a cooking medium, this technique is crucial for transforming texture. Crisp bacon is the happy result of properly rendered fat. Fry at too high a temperature, and it’ll burn on the outside while remaining flabby. The key is to cook it slowly enough to allow the fat to render at the same rate the bacon browns.
Since animal fats begin to burn at around 176°C, try arranging sliced bacon in a single layer on a baking sheet, and then slipping it into an oven set to that temperature. The heat of the oven will be gentler and more even than on the stove, giving the fat an opportunity to render. Or, when cooking bits of bacon or pancetta on the stove, start with a little water in the pan to help moderate the temperature and give the fat a chance to render before browning begins.
The skin of a roast chicken or turkey will crisp up on its own as long as the bird cooks long enough for the fat to render. Duck needs a little more help, though, since it has a thicker layer of subcutaneous fat to provide the bird with energy for flying and help keep it warm in the winter months. Using a very sharp needle or metal skewer, prick the skin of the entire bird, focusing particularly on the fattiest parts—the breast and the thighs. The holes will allow the rendering fat to escape and coat the skin as it melts, leaving you with glassy, crisp skin. If roasting a whole duck is beyond your comfort zone right now, start with duck breasts. Before cooking, score the skin on both diagonals with a sharp paring knife, leaving behind a pattern of tiny diamonds. The same rendering will occur on a smaller scale, leaving the breasts with perfectly crisped skin.
I’m a stickler for rendering the fat cap on pork chops and rib steaks. I hate getting a nicely cooked steak with a strip of flabby, barely cooked fat running down the side. So either start or finish the cooking process by laying a chop or steak on its side in the pan or on the grill, allowing the fat to render. This might require a little bit of balancing trickery on your part—hold the meat in place with your tongs, or try to cleverly lean the meat up against a carefully placed wooden spoon, or the edge of the pan itself. Whatever you do, don’t skip this step! You won’t regret taking the time to turn that strip of fat into something golden, crisp, and delicious.
Smoke Points
The smoke point of a fat is the temperature at which it decomposes and transforms into a visible, noxious gas. Have you ever added oil into a hot pan for sautéing vegetables and then been distracted by a ringing phone? If you’ve returned to an offensive, smoky scene at the stove, then the oil has surpassed its smoke point. Once, while I was trying to demonstrate the importance of preheating the pan to an intern, another cook approached me with an urgent question. By the time I addressed him and turned back to the pan, it was so aggressively hot that the second I added olive oil, it hit the smoke point, turning the pan black and throwing everyone nearby into a coughing fit. In an attempt to save face, I tried to imply that I’d made the mistake on purpose, and it had been a lesson about smoke points from the start. But, blushing hard before the other cooks, I couldn’t keep a straight face, and we soon all dissolved into laughter.
The higher a fat’s smoke point, the further it can be heated without ruining the flavour of the food cooking in it. Pure, refined vegetable oils such as grapeseed and peanut begin to smoke around 200°C, making them an ideal choice for high-heat applications such as deep- or stir-frying. Impure fats don’t do as well at extreme heats; the sediment in unfiltered olive oil and the milk solids in butter will begin to reach their smoke point, or burn, at about 176°C, making them well suited for applications where a very high temperature isn’t needed and their flavours can shine, such as oil-poaching, simple vegetable sautés, pan-frying fish or meat. Or, use them for dishes that don’t involve any heating, such as mayonnaise and vinaigrettes.
Achieving Crispness
Crispness results from food’s contact with hot fat and water evaporating from the surface of food. So do everything in your power to keep the pan and the fat hot when seeking a golden crust. Preheat the pan, then preheat the fat. Avoid putting more than a single layer of food into the pan, which will cause the temperature to drop drastically and steam to condense and make food soggy.
Delicate foods especially suffer in these instances. Cooking in fat that’s insufficiently hot will cause food to absorb the oil, resulting, for example, in unappetisingly beige, greasy fish fillets, cooked through but not golden. Steaks and pork chops placed in cold fat will take so long to sear that by the time they appear to be perfectly cooked, the meat within will be well-done, rather than medium-rare.
This doesn’t mean you should categorically crank the heat. If the fat is too hot, the outer surface of the food will brown and become crisp before the centre has a chance to cook through. Crisp onion rings with crunchy slivers of onion that slip out on first bite and chicken breast with burnt skin and a raw, flabby centre both suffer from having been cooked at temperatures that were too high.
The goal with all cooking is to achieve your desired result on the outside and inside of an ingredient at the same time. In this case, it’s a crisp surface and a tender centre. Add foods that take time to cook through, such as aubergine slices or chicken thighs, to hot fat, allowing a crust to form. Then, reduce the heat to prevent burning and allow them to cook all the way through. I’ll explain more about how to navigate between different levels of heat in Using Heat.
Once you have achieved crispness, do your best to retain it: do not cover or pile up crisp foods while they are still hot. They will continue to release steam. The lid will entrap steam, which will condense and drip back onto the food, making it soggy. Allow hot, crisp foods to cool off in a single layer to prevent this from happening. If you want to keep crisp foods such as fried chicken warm, set them in a warm spot in the kitchen, such as the back of the stove, until ready to serve. Alternatively, cool the chicken on a baking rack and then pop it into a hot oven for a few minutes to reheat it before serving.
Creamy
One of the great alchemical wonders of the kitchen, an emulsion happens when two liquids that normally don’t like to 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. Left alone for a few minutes, the oil and vinegar will begin to separate, or break. Use this broken vinaigrette to dress lettuce and the oil and vinegar will unevenly coat leaves, tasting too sour in one bite and too oily in the next. In comparison, a well-emulsified vinaigrette will offer balanced flavour in each bite.
When an emulsion breaks, the fat and water molecules begin to coalesce back into their own troops. In order 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.
Using Emulsions
Emulsions are efficient tools for enriching plain foods: a knob of butter swirled into a pan of pasta at the last moment, a spoonful of mayonnaise added into a dry, crumbly egg salad, a creamy vinaigrette drizzled over otherwise unadorned cucumbers and tomatoes for a simple summer salad.
Some cooking requires you to make an emulsion. Other times you will be handed an existing emulsion and your only job will be to keep it from breaking. Become familiar with common kitchen emulsions so you can protect their delicate bonds of cooperation.
Some familiar emulsions:
• Mayonnaise and hollandaise
• Vinaigrettes (though some are very temporary)
• Butter, cream, and milk
• Peanut butter and tahini (once you stir in the oil)
• Chocolate
• The ephemeral crema on top of an espresso
Achieving Creaminess: Mayonnaise
Mayonnaise is an oil-in-water emulsion made by slowly whisking tiny droplets of oil into an egg yolk, which itself is a natural emulsion of fat and water. Fortunately, the yolk offers us a little insurance, as it contains lecithin, an emulsifier with one end that likes fat and another that likes water. With vigorous whisking, lecithin connects the minuscule amount of water innate to a yolk to the oil droplets and surrounds tiny air bubbles. The two distinct ingredients integrate into a rich, unified sauce.
But mayonnaise—and this is true of all emulsions—is always looking for an excuse to break, or separate into the hostile groups of oil and water once again.
For a basic mayonnaise, measure out—or at least eyeball—the oil before you start. Choose your oil depending on how you intend to use the mayo—for spreading on a BLT or a Vietnamese bánh mì sandwich, use a neutral oil such as grapeseed or canola. For aïoli to serve alongside Tuna Confit in a Niçoise salad, use olive oil. Each egg yolk will comfortably hold about three-quarters of a cup of oil in a stable emulsion. Since homemade mayonnaise is best when it’s fresh, aim to make the smallest amount possible at a time, though any leftovers will keep in the fridge for a few days.
Oil-in-water emulsions always work better when their ingredients are neither too hot nor too cold. If you’re starting with an egg straight from the fridge, bring it up to room temperature before you start. If you’re in a hurry, submerge the egg in a bowl of warm tap water for a few minutes to speed things up.
Lightly dampen a kitchen towel and lay it into a small saucepan, then set the mayonnaise-making bowl in it. The wet towel will create enough friction to keep the bowl steady and prevent spillage. Place the yolk(s) in the bowl and start whisking, adding in the oil one drop at a time using a ladle or a spoon. Once you’ve added half the total volume of oil and created a relatively stable base, start to add the rest of the oil in more swiftly. If the mayonnaise grows so thick it’s hard to whisk, add a few drops of water or lemon juice to thin it out and prevent it from breaking. Once you’ve added all the oil, turn your attention to seasoning the mayonnaise to taste.
Follow these rules, and you’ll see that mayonnaise is difficult (but not impossible) to ruin. During one of his cooking lessons with me, Michael Pollan asked me to explain the science at work in an emulsion. I didn’t really know, so I responded, “Magic keeps it together.” Even now that I understand the science, I still believe there’s some magic at work.
Retaining Creaminess: Butter
One of my favourite poets, Seamus Heaney, once described butter as “coagulated sunlight,” which might be the most elegant and economical way to describe its special al chemy. To begin with, it’s the only animal fat made without killing an animal. Cows, goats, and sheep eat grass, a product of sunlight and photosynthesis, and deliver us milk. We skim the richest cream off the top, and churn it until it transforms into butter. The process is so straightforward that kids can make butter by shaking a glass jar filled with chilled cream.
Remember that butter, unlike oil, isn’t pure fat. It’s fat, water, and milk solids all held together in a state of emulsion. While most emulsions are stable in a narrow range of temperatures (just a few degrees), butter retains its solid form from freezing temperatures (0°C) until it melts (32°C). Compare this to what happens when you heat or freeze mayonnaise—it’ll break quickly!—and the magic of butter will become clear.
This explains why butter sweats when left on the kitchen worktop on a hot day—the water separates from the fat as it melts. At even warmer temperatures—in a pan over a hot burner, or in the microwave—butter’s fat and water will immediately separate. Melted butter, then, is a broken emulsion, hardening as it cools, never to return to its former miraculous state.
Take care of its emulsion and butter will lend creaminess to everything from jambon-beurre, the classic Parisian ham and butter baguette, to chocolate truffles. The precise temperatures prescribed for butter in recipes are not arbitrary: butter at room temperature is more pliable, allowing air to be worked into it to lighten cakes, or to combine more readily with flour, sugar, and eggs for tender cakes and cookies, or spread evenly onto a baguette, to be topped with ham. As I’ll explain later, it’s also important to keep butter cold in order to preserve its emulsion and prevent it from interacting with the proteins in flour when making doughs for flaky pastries, including All-Butter Pie Dough.
Julia Child once remarked, “With enough butter, anything is good.” Put her advice into practice by using butter to make another emulsion: butter sauce. Temperature is crucial with butter-water emulsions. The key is to start with a warm pan and cold butter. For a simple pan sauce, after removing a steak, fish fillet, or pork chop from the pan, tip out any excess fat. Place the pan back over the heat and add just enough liquid—water, stock, or wine—to coat the bottom. Using a wooden spoon, scrape any delicious crusty bits into the sauce and bring it to a boil. Then, for each serving, add 2 tablespoons of very cold butter into the pan and swirl over medium-high heat, letting the butter melt into the liquid. Don’t let the pan get so hot that the butter sizzles; as long as there is enough water in the sauce, you’ll be fine. Once you see the sauce begin to thicken, turn off the flame and let the butter finish melting over residual heat, but don’t stop swirling. Taste for salt and, if needed, add a squeeze of lemon or splash of wine. Spoon over the food and serve immediately.
The same method works for making butter-water sauces to coat noodles or vegetables. Do it directly in the pasta pan, as long as it’s hot enough and the butter is cold. Make sure there’s enough water in the pan, and swirl, toss, swirl to make the sauce and coat the pasta all at once. Add pecorino cheese and black pepper and you’ve got Pasta Cacio e Pepe, the classic Roman dish that’s even more delicious than macaroni and cheese.
Breaking and Fixing Emulsions
Some emulsions will naturally break with time, and others will break if fat and water are combined too quickly, but the most common way to ruin one is to allow its temperature to swing. Some emulsions must remain cold, and others warm. Yet others must be at room temperature. Heat a vinaigrette, and it will break. Chill a beurre blanc, and it will break. Each persnickety emulsion has its comfort zone.
Sometimes, you seek to break an emulsion, as when you melt butter to clarify it. Other times, it’s a disaster. Heat a chocolate sauce too quickly and it will break into a greasy, undesirable mess that even I wouldn’t pour over ice cream after the longest day. But, as important as it is to be careful with emulsions, ruining one isn’t the end of the world, and you almost always have some recourse.
If the magic holding together your mayonnaise expires and your emulsion breaks, don’t worry! The best way to learn how to fix a broken mayonnaise is to break it once deliberately so you can figure out how to salvage it.
Here’s the mind-bogglingly simple solution: get out a new bowl, but keep the same whisk. If you have only one bowl, scrape out the broken mayonnaise into a measuring cup with a spout or, failing that, a coffee cup, and clean the bowl.
Bring the clean bowl to the sink and spoon in half a teaspoon or so of the hottest water you can coax from your tap.
Using your oily, eggy whisk, start whisking the hot water maniacally, until it starts to foam. Then, treating the broken mayonnaise as if it were oil, add it drop by drop, continuing to whisk with the urgency of a swimmer escaping a shark. By the time you’ve added half of it back, it should start to resemble a proper mayonnaise again, perfect for slathering on a lobster roll. If this fails you, then begin the entire process over with the insurance a new egg yolk provides, and add the broken mayonnaise back in, a drop at a time.
In the future, if, while whisking together any emulsion, you notice things start to head south, keep these tips in mind. First, as soon as you suspect that you are on shaky ground, stop adding fat. If the emulsion isn’t thickening and the tines of the whisk aren’t leaving visible tracks, then for heaven’s sake stop adding oil! Sometimes, all that’s called for at this point is a good strong whisking to bring things back together.
You can also add a few chips of ice along with the first whiffs of doubt. If you don’t have ice on hand, a tiny splash of cold water from the tap will suffice to regulate temperature and keep the peace.
Flaky and Tender
Two proteins in wheat—glutenin and gliadin—comprise gluten. When you combine wheat flour and liquid to make dough or batter, these proteins link up with one another into long chains. As dough is kneaded or batter is mixed, the chains develop into strong, extensive webs or the gluten network. The expansion of these webs is called gluten development, and it’s what makes a dough chewy and elastic.
As gluten develops, dough becomes chewier. This is why bread bakers use flours with relatively high protein content, and work hard to knead doughs for long periods of time to create crusty, chewy country loaves. Salt also preserves the strength of the gluten network. (That’s why the mixer strained with effort when I belatedly added the salt to my pizza dough as a young cook at Chez Panisse.) But pastry chefs generally seek tender, flaky, and moist textures, so they do everything they can to limit or control gluten development, including using low protein flours and avoiding overkneading. Sugar and acids such as buttermilk or yoghurt also discourage gluten from developing, so adding them early on will tenderise pastries.
Too much fat can also inhibit gluten networks from forming. By coating individual gluten strands, fat prevents them from sticking to one another and lengthening. This is where the term shortening comes from, because the gluten strands remain short instead of lengthening.
Four main variables will determine the texture of any baked good (and some nonbaked ones, such as pasta): fat, water, yeast, and how much the dough or batter is kneaded or worked (see illustration on opposite page). The particular way and degree to which fat and flour are blended together, along with the type of flour and type and temperature of the fat, will also affect a pastry’s texture:
Short doughs are the epitome of tenderness, crumbling and melting in your mouth. Here, flour and fat are blended together intimately, resulting in a smooth, homogeneous dough. Many of the shortest recipes, such as shortbread cookies, call for very soft or even melted butter, in order to encourage this now fluid fat to quickly coat individual flour particles, preventing gluten webs from forming. These doughs are often soft enough to press into the pan.
Rather than crumbling, flaky doughs break apart into flakes when you take a bite. Think of classic American pies and French galettes, with crusts sturdy enough to hold up to a mile-high pile of apples or juicy summer fruits, but delicate enough to produce thin, uneven flakes when sliced. To create that strength, some of the fat is worked into the flour, and a minimal amount of gluten is developed. To achieve the signature flakes of a perfect pie or galette crust, the fat must be very cold so that some of it can remain in distinct pieces. Roll out a properly made pie dough and you’ll see the chunks of butter. When you slide the pie into a hot oven, the cold pieces of butter, entrapped air, and steam from the water released by the butter, all push apart the layers of dough to create flakes.
The flakiest pastries are made with laminated doughs. Picture the flakes on your plate (or shirt) after you’ve eaten a classic puff pastry, such as a cheese straw, palmier, or a strudel. It’s a mess! A pile of gorgeous, glassy shards! To achieve this texture, a flaky dough is wrapped around a large slab of butter. This dough-and-butter sandwich is rolled out and then folded back upon itself in a process called a turn. Classic puff pastry, when turned six times, will have precisely 730 layers of dough separated by 729 layers of butter! Upon entering a hot oven, each one of those distinct layers of butter will turn to steam, creating 730 layers of flakes. It’s crucial, when making laminated doughs, that the fat and workspace remain cold so the butter does not melt, though the butter must be soft enough to roll into a slab.
Yeasted doughs, kneaded to develop gluten, and then treated in this way, can yield laminated breads that exist at that precarious intersection of chewiness and flakiness, including croissants, Danishes, and the Breton speciality called kouign amann.
Achieving Tenderness: Shortbread Cookies and Cream Biscuits
Shortbread cookies should be tender, with a fine, sandy crumb. This texture is the result of incorporating fat into flour early in the dough-making process. My favourite shortbread recipe calls for butter so soft it’s “spreadable like mayonnaise” so that the fat can readily coat flour particles and keep gluten strands from developing.
Use any soft or liquid fat including cream, crème fraîche, softened cream cheese, or oil to coat flour and achieve tender textures. In classic recipes for cream biscuits, cold whipping cream functions as both the fat and the liquid binder, quickly coating the flour and obviating the need for additional water to develop the gluten network.
Achieving Flakiness: Pie Dough
Guided by lore almost as much as science, the rules of making flaky pastry appeal to my old-wives’-tale-loving heart. Stories of pastry chefs landing jobs due to their cold hands are commonplace since it’s so important to keep the fat for flaky pastry dough chilled. While there’s little evidence to prove that rumour, there’s plenty to support pastry chefs’ compulsion to keep everything cold: they work on cool marble worktops and freeze their mixer bowls and metal tools. One pastry chef with whom I worked for years even insisted on making her doughs in a freezing-cold kitchen. With a sweater and puffy vest layered over her chef’s coat, she’d get to work two hours before anyone else, then rush to mix her doughs before the rest of us arrived and lit the ovens, stove, and grill. She made every decision with temperature in mind, and it paid off—her pastries were ethereally flaky.
Cold-handed or not, consider temperature when you seek flakiness to create layers of developed gluten interspersed by pockets of fat. The warmer, and hence softer, your butter, the more readily it will combine with the flour. Because fat inhibits gluten development, the more intimately the two ingredients combine, the more tender—not flaky—a dough will be.
To prevent gluten from developing, keep butter cold. This will protect the delicate bonds of its emulsion while you mix and roll dough. Butter contains about 15 to 20 percent water by weight. If butter softens and melts as it’s worked into the dough, its emulsion will break, releasing that water. Water droplets will bind with the flour, developing into long gluten strands that will cause the dough’s delicate layers to stick together. If they’re stuck together, they can’t steam apart and flake as they bake. The pastry will emerge from the oven chewy and elastic.
Vegetable shortening (Trex, for example) is more forgiving of rising temperatures than butter and will remain in solid form even in a warm kitchen, but it just doesn’t taste as good. By the time it reaches body temperature, butter melts away, leaving behind its rich, satisfying flavour as the tongue’s lone souvenir. In contrast, the same chemical qualities that make shortening more stable at warm temperatures keep it from melting away at body temperature, leaving an unpleasant, plasticky residue on the tongue.
I prefer not to sacrifice flavour for the forgiveness that shortening offers. There is a trade-off: certain measures must be taken to achieve a buttery pie crust flaky enough to shatter at the lightest touch of a fork. At home, chill the diced butter, flour, and tools in the freezer before you start, in order to encourage the butter to remain in distinct chunks even as you work it into the dough. Work quickly to reduce the threat of its softening. Don’t overmix. And finally, ensure that the dough spends plenty of time chilling in the fridge between the steps of mixing, rolling, assembling, and baking. I find it easiest to make pastry dough in advance and keep it tightly wrapped in the freezer, where it can stay for up to 2 months. That cuts out the most time-intensive step, freeing me to make and bake my pie when the fancy strikes.
It’s important to slide the chilled, assembled pie directly into a preheated oven. In a hot oven, the water contained in the butter will quickly evaporate. The steam will push apart layers of dough as it expands with heat, yielding the flakes we so prize. If the oven’s not sufficiently hot, the water won’t evaporate and the crust won’t set before the filling seeps in, and the pie will emerge from the oven disappointingly soggy.
Achieving Flakiness and Tenderness: Tart Dough
Prone to bouts of overindulgence at the farmers’ market, I tend to find myself with more produce at any given moment than I know I can use up. (You try saying no to ripe Santa Rosa plums, perfectly sweet-tart nectarines, and juicy boysenberries, which always come into season on exactly the same day!) With an understanding of the science of fat, my friend Aaron Hyman sought to develop a tart dough that’s structured yet delicate. His ideal dough would stand up to mounds of juicy summer stone fruit but still yield flaky shards when bitten. He wanted a crust that would be both flaky and tender. And I wanted a crust that I could bake any time I had extra fruit on hand.
First, he thought about how to achieve flakiness. He decided to keep everything cold, use large chunks of butter, and mix the dough just enough to form a small amount of gluten for the flaky layers. Then, to achieve tenderness, he selected liquid fats to bind the dough—cream and crème fraîche—and to coat the remaining loose flour with fat to prevent further gluten development.
Aaron’s method is foolproof. I’ve always struggled with pastry dough, but his recipe leads me to success every time. With Aaron’s Tart Dough in the freezer, a regal dinner is always within reach. Stockpile several discs of dough for the moment when you want to invite friends over and have little more in the pantry than a basket of ageing onions, a Parmesan rind, and a can of anchovies. Or when you realise you’ve committed to bringing dessert to a party but doubt you have the time to make anything special. Or when you go a little overboard at the farmers’ market. Tart dough is the key to making something out of nothing.
Tender Cakes
For years I was disappointed by almost every single cake I tasted, whether I’d baked it myself or ordered it in a restaurant or bakery. I dreamed of a cake that was moist yet flavourful. So many cakes were one or the other: store-bought cake mixes yielded the texture I was after but were relatively flavourless, and cakes from fancy patisseries were rich in flavour but often dry or dense. I figured it was an either-or situation. And I resigned myself to it.
Then I tasted a chocolate birthday cake so moist and rich that I nearly fainted from delight. For days, that slice of cake haunted me, so I begged my friend for the recipe. She called it Chocolate Midnight Cake, for how darkly rich it was, and when she shared the recipe, I noticed it was made with oil and water rather than butter. When I tasted the Fresh Ginger and Molasses Cake at Chez Panisse for the first time a few months later, I was stunned by its perfectly moist texture and deep, spicy flavour. I begged for its recipe, too, and noticed that it was eerily similar to my friend’s.
There was something to these oil cakes. I flipped through my mental recipe box and realised that many of my favourite cakes, including classic carrot cake and olive oil cake, are made with oil instead of butter. Even cake mixes, which produce the ideal texture I’d been trying to emulate, direct you to add oil. What is it about oil that yields such moist cakes?
Science holds the answer. Oil efficiently coats flour proteins and prevents strong gluten networks from forming, much like soft butter does in shortbread. Gluten development requires water, so this oil barrier significantly inhibits gluten formation, leading to a tender, rather than chewy, texture. As an added bonus, less gluten means more water in the batter, and, ultimately, a moister cake.
Once I discovered the secrets of oil cake, I could anticipate the qualities of a particular cake without even trying the recipe. If oil was listed among the ingredients, I knew the recipe would yield the signature moist texture I loved so much. But there were times I craved a buttery cake, too. Rich flavour, rather than a moist texture, took priority in cakes I wanted to enjoy in the afternoon with a cup of tea, or serve to friends at brunch. Emboldened by my discoveries about texture, I began to wonder if I could make a better butter cake. The answer lay not in treating butter like oil and melting it, but rather in capitalising on butter’s incredible capacity for lightness.
LIGHT
Lightness might not be the first quality you associate with fat, but its remarkable capacity to entrap air when whipped allows it to act as a leavening, or raising, agent in cakes and transform liquid cream into billowy clouds.
Some classic cakes have no chemical leavening—that is, bicarbonate of soda or baking powder—and rely entirely on whipped fat for their cloudlike structure. In pound cake, whipped butter and eggs do all the work of leavening. In génoise, a type of sponge cake, whipped eggs, whose fatty yolks entrap the air and protein-rich whites surround air pockets, allow the cake to rise. This is the only leavener. There is no baking powder, no bicarbonate of soda, no yeast, and not even any creamed butter to help this cake rise! It is miraculous.
Achieving Lightness: Butter Cakes and Whipped Cream
When seeking rich flavour and a fine, velvety crumb, make a butter cake (or chocolate chip cookies) but take care to aerate this fat by creaming, or whipping, butter with sugar to trap air bubbles for leavening. Typically, cool room-temperature butter is beaten together with sugar for 4 to 7 minutes until the mixture is light and fluffy. When done correctly, the butter will act as a net, entrapping millions of tiny air bubbles throughout the mixture.
The key is to work air in slowly, so that many consistently tiny bubbles form and you don’t create too much heat through friction. It might be tempting to crank up the mixer so you can get the cake into the oven sooner, but trust me—that’ll take you nowhere good, fast. I speak from experience. The road to this chapter is lined with dense, fallen cakes.
As you mix, monitor the butter’s temperature; remember, butter is an emulsion and if it gets too warm, it will melt and the emulsion will break or it simply won’t be rigid enough to continue trapping air. You’ll lose all the air you worked so hard to entrap. If butter is too cold, air won’t be able to get in—not evenly at least—and the cake won’t rise straight up.
And if fat isn’t properly aerated, chemical leavening won’t make up for it. Bicarbonate of soda and baking powder don’t introduce any new air bubbles into a batter. They simply help expand, via the release of carbon dioxide gas, air bubbles already in place.
Incorporating ingredients delicately is important for the same reason—if you go to great lengths to whip air into your fat, then carelessly combine the cake’s dry and wet ingredients, all at once, you’ll lose all of the air you whipped up. This is where folding, the technique of gently combining aerated ingredients into nonaerated ingredients, becomes important. Try to fold using light movements with a rubber spatula in one hand, while spinning the bowl with the other hand.
Though the chemistry behind whipped cream is slightly different than that of whipped butter—it must be very cold, to begin with—the concept at work here is the same: fat surrounds air bubbles. As cream is whipped, solid fat droplets in the liquid break open and join together (remember that cream is a natural emulsion). Overwhip cream and the fat droplets will warm up and continue to stick to one another, making the cream unappetisingly chunky. Whip it further, and cream’s emulsion will break, yielding a watery liquid—buttermilk—and solid fat—butter.
USING FAT
Only on the most special occasions do Persian meals end with dessert, so we never did much baking at our house. Plus, Maman, a health fiend, denied us excess sugar at every turn (though that did little more than encourage my brothers and me to develop fervent sweet tooths). If we wanted cookies or cake, then, we had to make them ourselves, and Maman did her best to ensure it’d be an uphill battle the whole way. She didn’t equip the kitchen with either a stand mixer or a microwave for softening butter, and she stored all the extra butter in the freezer.
When it hit, the craving for cookies or cake was always urgent. I was never patient enough to wait for frozen butter to come up to room temperature, as every single recipe commanded. And even if I did somehow summon the discipline required to wait for butter to soften, without an electric mixer to help cream it, my cookie dough was always a mess—somehow completely overworked and undermixed at the same time, with huge pieces of unincorporated butter. As a typical teenage know-it-all, I knew I was way more clever than any recipe writer. So I figured I could just melt the butter for my baking on the stove and forgo the softening and creaming processes completely. Melted butter was a heck of a lot easier to stir into cookie dough with a wooden spoon, after all, and it sure made cake batter nice and pourable.
What I didn’t know then was that by melting the butter, I was destroying any chance I had at working air into it. My cookies and cakes always emerged from the oven disappointingly flat and dense. At an age when my primary goal in baking was to eat something—anything!—sweet, this was a minor problem: my brothers and I hungrily gobbled up whatever came out of the oven. As an adult with a slightly more discerning palate, I’m going for more than just a hit of sugar. I want my desserts—and, frankly, everything I cook—to be uniformly delicious, with the ideal texture and flavour. You probably do, too. All it takes is a little forethought.
Layering Fats
Since fats have such a powerful impact on flavour, most dishes will benefit from the use of more than one kind. This is what I call layering fats. In addition to considering the cultural appropriateness of a particular fat, think about whether it will harmonise with the other ingredients in a dish. For example, if you’re planning to finish a fish dish with butter sauce, use clarified butter to cook the fish so that the two fats will complement each other. Pair blood oranges with creamy avocado in a salad, then drizzle everything with agrumato olive oil to amplify the citrus flavour. For perfectly crisp waffles, melt butter to add to the batter, but brush the hot iron with fat that’s rendered out of the breakfast bacon.
Sometimes you’ll need to use multiple fats to achieve different textures within a single dish. Deep-fry crisp pieces of fish in grapeseed oil, and then use olive oil to make a creamy Aïoli to serve alongside it. Use oil to make a supremely moist Chocolate Midnight Cake, then slather it in buttercream frosting or softly whipped cream.
Balancing Fat
As with salt, the best way to correct overly fatty food is to rebalance the dish, so the solutions are similar to when you oversalt: add more food to increase total volume, add more acid, water it down, or add starchy or dense ingredients. If possible, chill the dish, let the fat come to the surface and solidify, then skim it off. Alternatively, lift food out of a very greasy pan and dab it on a clean towel, leaving the fat behind.
Foods that are too dry, or need just a bump of richness, can always be corrected with a little olive oil (or other appropriate oil), or another creamy ingredient such as sour cream, crème fraîche, egg yolk, or goat’s cheese to improve the texture and get the flavour right. Use vinaigrette, mayonnaise, a soft, spreadable cheese, or creamy avocado to balance out dryness in a sandwich piled high with lean ingredients or built atop thick, crusty bread.
Improvising with Salt and Fat
Follow the tenets I outline in How Fat Works to achieve whichever texture you’re after, then refer to The World of Fat (here) to guide you in evoking the flavours of wildly different places. Choose to pan-fry Finger-Lickin’ Pan-Fried Chicken, for instance, in clarified butter for a classic French flavour. If you’re craving an Indian-inspired meal and want to dig into that jar of mango chutney in the refrigerator door, change the cooking fat to ghee. If it’s a Japanese chicken cutlet you’re craving, use a neutral oil studded with a few drops of toasted sesame oil. In all of these cases, the fat must be sufficiently hot to swiftly lead to browning and deliver a crisp exterior.
Before you bake a birthday cake for your sweetie pie, do a little reconnaissance. Is it the moist, tender crumb of an oil cake she prefers, or the dense, velvety one of a butter cake? Since even I won’t recommend improvising when you bake, let this information guide you to a recipe using the right fat to make your honey happy.
With what you know about fat and what you know about salt, you’ll find that you’re closer to riffing than you might think. Fat has a remarkable capacity to affect texture, while salt and fat can both enhance flavour. Practise using salt and fat to improve flavour and texture every single time you cook. If you intend to finish a salad with a shower of creamy ricotta salata, hold back on some of the salt until after you taste a bite of it with its salty garnish. Similarly, when you’re dicing pancetta to add richness to Pasta all’Amatriciana, wait to season the sauce until after it’s absorbed all the salt from the pork. And if a recipe for pizza dough instructs you to add salt after kneading in olive oil, think twice about following it word for word. Start to use what you know to be true to guide you through the vast forests of myth and misinformation that poorly written recipes comprise.
Improvising begins with notes, and now you have two with which to compose a Salt-Fat melody. Master a third note, and you’ll experience the transcendent harmony of Salt, Fat, and Acid.
