There may be overlap in the answers you give, but is there one number that you picked most often? Here’s what your answers say about your cooking style:

1. Giving: Friendly, well liked, and enthusiastic; giving cooks seldom experiment. They love baking, and like to serve tried-and-true family favorites, although that sometimes means serving less healthful foods.

2. Healthy: Optimistic, book-loving, nature enthusiasts; healthy cooks experiment with fish, fresh produce, and herbs. Health comes first, even if it means sometimes sacrificing taste. Healthy cooks are the most likely to have a garden too.

3. Methodical: Talented cooks who rely heavily on recipes, methodical cooks have refined tastes and manners. Their creations always look exactly like the picture in the cookbook.

4. Innovative: Creative and trend-setting, innovative cooks seldom use recipes and like to experiment with ingredients, cuisine styles, and cooking methods. Cooks of this type tend to be creative in other parts of their lives as well.

5. Competitive: The “Iron Chef” of the neighborhood, competitive cooks have dominant personalities and are intense perfectionists who love to impress their guests.

Internet Average Pancakes

No one’s ever wrong on the Internet, so the average of a whole bunch of right things must be righter, right? The quantities here are based on the rounded average of eight different pancake recipes from an online search.

In a mixing bowl, measure out and whisk together:

In a separate large, microwave-safe bowl, melt:

Add to the butter and whisk to combine thoroughly:

Pour the dry ingredients into the liquid ingredients and mix them together with a whisk or spoon until just incorporated. Little pockets of flour are okay; you want to avoid overstirring the batter to minimize the amount of gluten formed by the flour (see page 246 for more about gluten in flour).

Place a nonstick frying pan on a burner set to medium-high. Wait until the pan is hot. The standard test is to toss a few drops of water into the pan and see if they sizzle; if you happen to have an infrared thermometer for checking surface temperatures, check that the pan is around 400°F / 200°C. Use a ladle, measuring cup, or ice cream scoop to pour about half a cup of batter into the pan. As the first side cooks, you’ll see bubbles forming on the top surface of the pancake. Flip the pancake after those bubbles have started to form but before they pop (about 2 minutes).

Average ratios for pancakes.

Notes

• The order of ingredients usually indicates the order in which you should add them into your bowl. It doesn’t always matter, but in this case you should add the milk before the eggs to prevent the eggs from cooking in the hot butter.

• If you use a nonstick frying pan, don’t butter the pan first. If you’re using a regular sauté pan, butter it and then wipe away the butter with a paper towel. Too much butter on the surface of the pan will cause uneven browning because parts of the pancake won’t cook as hot.

This is the first recipe my parents taught me. And yes, that says the pancakes “must be poured into this shape” with a drawing of a Mickey Mouse head.

Oat and Egg White Frittata with Fruit

A frittata is like an omelet but has ingredients whisked into the eggs. My version, based on one I had in health-conscious Southern California, uses just the egg whites to make a tasty, easy-to-cook weekend breakfast treat. (Don’t let that “health-conscious” bit lower your taste expectations—this is amazingly tasty.)

You’ll need a batch of steel-cut oatmeal, already cooked—see the previous page for how to prepare this if you’re not familiar. Each frittata serves one person, so plan accordingly.

Preheat the oven by setting it to broil mode. Adjust the top rack to be about 6 inches (15 cm) away from the broiler.

In a bowl, separate out 3 egg whites, saving the egg yolks for some other dish, such as crème brûlée (see page 372). If you’ve never separated eggs before, the “easy” method is to crack the eggs into the bowl and then, using all your fingers, carefully pick up the yolks. Don’t worry if you get a little egg yolk mixed into the whites, but try to keep them separate. Add 1 cup of cooked steel-cut oatmeal (150g) and a generous pinch of salt. Using a whisk, beat the mixture to a foamy, almost soft-peak stage.

Soft peaks will stick to your whisk but fold over.
See page 289 to learn more about egg whites.

Set a frying pan on medium heat. Add 1–2 tablespoons (15–30g) of either canola oil or butter. Heat the pan for 3–4 minutes, waiting until the oil or butter is hot.

Pour the egg white and oat mixture into the pan, spreading it out to an even thickness.

After 3 minutes, check to see if the underside is browning. Continue checking every minute or so until the bottom turns light golden brown.

Once the bottom is browned, place the pan under the broiler, taking care to position the handle so as to not cook it too. Cook until the top is golden brown.

To serve, slide the frittata onto a plate and top with:

Dust with ½ teaspoon (1g) cinnamon; optionally add a little maple syrup.

Adam Savage on Scientific Testing

PHOTO CC-BY-SA-3.0 PORKRIND ON EN.WIKIPEDIA.COM

Adam Savage is the cohost of MythBusters, a popular science program that examines rumors, myths, and conventional wisdom, “putting them to the test” with a scientific approach.

How do you go about testing a myth?

One of the earliest things we realized on the show is that you always have to have something to compare to. We would try to come up with an answer like: is this guy dead, is this car destroyed, is this an injury? And we would be trying to compare it to an absolute value, like X number of feet fallen equals dead. The problem is the world is very spongy and nonuniform, and trying to nail down a value like that can be really difficult. So we always end up doing relative tests. We end up doing a control under regular circumstances and then we test the myth under identical circumstances, and we compare the two things. In that comparison, we get to see our results.

We did one where we were testing whether or not you could tenderize steaks with explosives. We had to figure out what tenderness is. The problem is you can give two different people each a piece of steak from the same cut compared to a piece of steak from a different cut, and they might come up with two different assessments of which one is more tender. We actually did a whole day of testing that didn’t end up on film because we realized we were using the wrong parameters for assessing steak tenderness. The USDA [United States Department of Agriculture] actually has a machine for testing the tenderness of steak that measures the pounds of force it takes to punch a hole through a steak. We replicated that machine and to our great surprise, it worked exactly as it was supposed to. Coming up with something for $50 that equals the USDA testing equipment: that was thrilling!

How can testing a myth translate into learning more about cooking?

Changing one variable is probably the single hardest thing for people to understand. Change only one variable. It’s not like changing only a small number of variables; it’s really changing one variable at a time, because only then do you know what caused the change between your first test and your second test. You get so much clarity from the process that way.

I’m an avid cook. My wife and I both cook a lot of elaborate things, and we really do love playing around with single variables, changing things and learning how things work. We were reading Thomas Keller, and he talked about how salt is a flavor enhancer, and he mentioned that vinegar does a similar thing. It doesn’t add a new taste, but it often alters the taste that’s there. My wife was making a cauliflower soup, and it was kind of bland. I didn’t want to put any more salt in it, because I could tell it was about to go in the wrong direction. We tossed in a little bit of vinegar and the whole thing just woke up. It was thrilling! I love that.

Have you done other myths related to food?

We have—certainly a whole bunch of drinking myths. We did poppy seed bagels to see if eating a poppy seed bagel causes you to test positive for heroin, which is absolutely true. In fact, parolees are completely forbidden from eating poppy seed bagels. They’re told if you test positive for drugs, we are not going to wonder why. You are just going to go back to jail, so make it easy: don’t eat poppy seeds.

I had a whole episode written called “The Surreal Gourmet,” which ended with tenderizing steak with dynamite, but it had all those other things like poaching fish on your catalytic converter or cooking eggs in your dishwasher. [MythBusters cohost] Jamie loves the idea of tenderizing meat in the dryer. Also, the idea of is it safe to eat fresh roadkill? We think that would be just hilarious and gross.

The problem-solving aspect of the show is really fascinating. Do you have any advice on how to get to where you want to be when problems arise?

The first thing to realize is that you’re not going to end up where you think. The world is smarter than you are. A craftsman isn’t somebody who never screws up. A craftsman screws up just as much as you do. They can just see it coming, and can adjust; it’s an ongoing process. Everybody’s oven heats at a different rate. You open it up to check, the temperature drops. There are all sorts of variables. Maybe it’s humid, maybe it’s not. Humidity was affecting all sorts of my wife’s cookie recipes. People tend to overfocus on the final product, when you’ve got to be awake to the process. So problem solving doesn’t mean doing whatever it takes to get to the end result; it means following the path that you’re on. You’re going to probably end up changing your definition of what the result is before you’re done.

The better you get, the more that things start to turn out like you planned. When my wife started doing really serious baking, I couldn’t believe how much of a difference just having all your ingredients at room temperature made in terms of the emulsifying and chemical reactions—getting the doughs flaky, for instance. Just the simple thing of pulling all of your ingredients out of the refrigerator an hour before you start cooking has a massive effect on the final product. Or things like certain kinds of berries in certain kinds of pastries; the acidity of the berries means having to add more baking soda. I love that. You just have to learn as you go.

What do you enjoy cooking?

My favorite thing to cook of all is eggs. After years of practice, I’ve almost mastered the pan flip for an omelet without the spatula. I’ve actually held brunches for 15 people where the theme was “come and I’ll cook you eggs any way you want.” My kids are both really getting into it now. They wake up (they’re 10-year-old twins) and they both have their specific ways that they like cooking eggs. My son Addison prefers the hobo egg, in which you cut a hole out of a piece of bread and fry an egg in that hole, and my son Riley likes scrambled eggs. He likes them a little bit on the hard side, but I’m trying to teach him not to cook them too much.

That does seem to be a common affliction, overcooking eggs and getting dry scrambled eggs.

With enough sauce, they’d work, but when you start to cook them right, it turns out that there is this tiny band in which they’re unbelievably good. That’s why I like eggs. They’re kind of unforgiving in some ways and that’s really exciting.

One of the great things about cooking is that, unless you’re doing something really specifically unforgiving, most recipes are really quite impressively forgiving. That’s a part I really love. You can change all sorts of variables and it still comes out pretty darn good. It’s a great test platform.

How do you learn from the things that don’t succeed?

I hand-whipped my first whipped cream about six or seven years ago. I whipped it, and the very first thing I did once it was whipped was I whipped it too far on purpose. I thought, “I know this is perfect, but I want to know where the line is,” and I just kept on going until I had butter. It was surprisingly fast and taught me a really clear thing about exactly where you can go with whipping cream.

Whipped cream tastes great. Flavoring it and sweetening it is just trivial. If you’re good, you can do it almost as fast as it takes to get the mixers and the bowls out and do it all mechanically. It’s a lovely thing to sit there and talk to your guests while you’re hand-whipping cream.

See page 300 to read about whipping cream.

Congee

Everybody has to eat, and every culture has a standard dish based on the grains that grow locally. Different regions of the world support growing different crops: oats and wheat in the United States, oats in parts of Europe, and rice in much of Asia. All of these come from the same family of plants (Poaceae—a.k.a. true grasses), so it’s not surprising that these grains can be boiled in water, or sometimes milk, to similar result. Wheat becomes cream of wheat, oats become porridge, and rice becomes congee.

You’re unlikely to see congee on many restaurant menus or featured in many cookbooks, for the same reason that oatmeal and porridge don’t appear very often: it’s a home-cooked staple, not an eating-out “fancy” food. That doesn’t mean congee isn’t delicious and nutritious—a billion people eat it every day! For some, congee is the equivalent of chicken noodle soup: something nourishing to turn to when you’re sick or looking for comfort.

Congee can be subdivided into several different versions, depending upon the culture. The Chinese call it jook or zhou: runny rice porridge sometimes topped with eggs, fish paste, scallions, tofu, and soy sauce. In India, it’s called ganji—rice soup—and has flavorings such as coconut milk, curry, ginger, and cumin seeds added to it. When it’s cooked in sweet milk with cardamom and topped with pistachios or almonds, you have the dessert version, common in Indian restaurants.

Cooking congee is also a great opportunity to go off-recipe, because there isn’t one! Explore. Blend ingredients and flavors together. Try other grains, too. Why not try steel-cut oats with traditional congee toppings: savory steel-cut oats with green onion, fried garlic, and over-easy egg? Sounds delicious. Amazing culinary creations result where two different cultures mingle, such as in the Mediterranean (North African + Southern European), Southeast Asia (Asian + European), and the Caribbean (African + Western European). Israeli markets carry ingredients from the surrounding western regions of North Africa (especially Morocco) and Eastern Europe; Israeli cuisine is influenced by the traditions of both areas. Modern Vietnamese food was heavily impacted by French occupation in the 19th century. The United States, with so many different cultures mingling, is perhaps the most recent example of what’s termed fusion cooking: witness the African, Native American, and Spanish influences in Southern cooking; Western European and African backgrounds combining in Louisiana Creole food; and the infusion of Mexican cuisine in Tex-Mex. Congee is just one easy place to begin exploring fusion cooking. Think about how the rice is used, and how oats, cream of wheat, or corn grits might work. Experiment!

Cook for at least several hours in a cooker set to slow-cook mode, or in a pot set over very low heat:

When you’re ready to eat, heat the rice to near boiling to finish cooking. The long, low-heat cooking will have broken down the starches; boiling the liquid will cause them to gelatinize and quickly thicken. I have a pressure cooker that has a slow-cook mode, so I switch it from slow-cook mode to rice mode, which is hotter and will take the rice up to near boiling. If you are doing this in a pot on the stovetop, set the pot over medium heat, periodically stirring and checking it while working on the rest of these instructions so that it does not burn on the bottom.

While the rice is cooking, prepare a number of toppings. There’s no fixed list of ingredients—a million cooks can’t be getting this wrong every day.

Here’s one combination that I enjoy:

Tofu, cut into small cubes and browned on all sides

Scallions, chopped into small pieces

Garlic, sliced into thin discs and toasted on each side to make “garlic chips”

Hot sauce, such as sriracha sauce

Soy sauce

Toasted almond slices

Some additional suggestions:

For savory congee, try various combinations of dried fish, rousong (a type of dried meat that’s a traditional topping for congee), shredded chicken, furikake (a Japanese seasoning used on top of rice, consisting of dried ground fish, seaweed powder, and sesame seeds), roasted sesame seeds, pickled cucumbers, fried gluten, miso paste, peanuts, cilantro, fried shallots/onions, butter.

For a sweeter congee, think about common traditional oatmeal toppings (sugar, honey, cinnamon, milk, fruit) and then imagine their relatives in other cuisines (coconut milk, coconut flakes, sweet red beans, mochi, dates, boiled sweetened peanuts).

You can serve this family-style, with the toppings in small bowls where your guests can help themselves, or you can portion the toppings out more formally: a tablespoon or two of tofu, a few teaspoons of scallions, a sprinkling of garlic chips, and a dash of sriracha and soy sauces. Quantity is not particularly important, but go easy on the hot and salty sauces.

Notes

• To toast the garlic, use a sharp knife to slice a few cloves (or more, if you’re a garlicphile) into thin discs. Place a frying pan on a burner set to medium-high heat, but do not add oil. Arrange the garlic wafers in a single, thin layer. Toast one side until medium brown, about 2–3 minutes, and then flip (try using tongs) to toast the second side.

• Try cracking an egg into the congee at the end of cooking, either in the pot (and then mix it in), or in the individual bowls (you might need to pop the congee into the microwave for a minute if it isn’t hot enough to fully cook the egg). Adding an egg will alter the texture and give the dish a much richer taste.

Jacques Pépin on Cooking

Jacques Pépin is a celebrated chef and educator who has authored over 20 books, including Jacques Pépin’s New Complete Techniques (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2012). He has hosted several shows about cooking on PBS, including Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home, which won an Emmy Award. He is the recipient of numerous James Beard Awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award.

How did you first come to be in the kitchen?

Well, I was born into the kitchen in the sense that my parents had a restaurant. My brother and I would help with cleaning, or washing dishes, or peeling one thing or another. Either I was going to go be a cabinetmaker like my father or get into the kitchen like my mother. So it was a choice that I made very willingly. I thought the kitchen was exciting, with the noise, the smell, and so forth.

You were raised in France and then in 1959, you moved to the United States. Why?

I was doing very well in France. I worked in the biggest places—the Plaza Athénée, Fouquet’s, Maxim’s—and I even became the chef to the president. I’m saying that I had no real incentive to come to the US except for a profound desire to go like young people did. I thought that I would stay maybe a couple of years, learn the language, and go back. From the moment I was in New York, I loved it and I never went back.

Then you ended up working at Howard Johnson’s shortly after moving here, being hired by Mr. Johnson directly in 1961. You wrote in the New York Times that it was your most valuable apprenticeship. How so?

My most valuable American apprenticeship, certainly. I was asked to go to the White House and, to tell you the truth, I had no idea of the potential for publicity. The cook was in the kitchen and that was the end of it. When I was with the president in France, we were never asked to go into the dining room or had anyone coming to see us. If anyone came into the kitchen it was because something was wrong! When asked to go to the White House because of the experience I had in France, I didn’t want to do that and Howard Johnson represented a totally different world, a world that I didn’t know anything about: a world of mass production, a world of American eating habits.

You’ve been involved in American food for half a century and French cuisine for decades before that. Where do you think our relationship with food will go in the future?

I don’t know, but America is unique in the sense that, in France, 99% of people cook French food because that’s what they are born with. The food is good and that’s fine. In Italy, 99% of people cook Italian. Same thing in Spain, in Portugal, in Germany. America is quite different. People will cook Turkish one day and then they go from a Swahili restaurant to a Yucatan restaurant, then to a French restaurant, an Italian, and so forth. That situation has been created in the last 20 years or so in America; it’s the most exciting country in the world because of that type of diversity.

The cook, 50 years ago when I came here, was on the bottom on the social scale. Any good mother would have wanted her son to be an architect or a lawyer, certainly not a cook. Now we are geniuses. There are 400 television shows on cooking I was told, so it’s just absolutely amazing. Where will it go? I don’t know, but it will never go back to the way it was. The whole food industry in this country is enormous and people are getting very, very knowledgeable.

What do you tell people who are just learning to think about food, learning to cook?

I tell people if you don’t know where to start, but you know you’re going to go into the food world, start in the kitchen because this is the core of it. And whether you become a food critic or a food photographer, whatever you’ve learned there will be useful. It is not necessarily true if you start in another area of the food world. Food has moved into all areas, from academia to the simple bistro to food trucks.

You’ve mentioned that it’s a good thing that we have to take time out for the pleasure of eating every day. There must also be, of course, the pleasure of cooking.

I use the supermarket as a prep cook, which is feasible now and wasn’t before. I have a nonstick pan, I buy skinless boneless breasts of chicken, presliced mushrooms, and prewashed spinach, and with minimal effort, I can do a dish in 10 to 15 minutes. You can have pleasure in cooking, enjoy it, and have something nice and fresh.

That’s such a good observation that the modern grocery store has become the sous chef for the home cook. Do you think our understanding of how ingredients work, the chemistry of things, has changed over the past decades?

There has been some change, why hollandaise sauce breaks down and all that, but a chef learns in a different way. The way you sharpen a knife, the way you beat an egg white, the way you bone a chicken, or the way you make an omelet is the same now as it was 50 years ago. I can walk along the stove and I can tell you the chicken in the oven is done cooking because, we say, the chicken “chante.” It sings at the point that all of the juice has evaporated and the fat that has accumulated in the pan fries or “sings.” It’s like when you touch a piece of meat on the grill. That steak is medium or rare, the way you want it, and you take it off.

I have been with people who are very knowledgeable about the chemistry of food and how things work, and you end up eating a lousy meal. And then you go to the little Italian mama who would have absolutely no idea of the chemistry when she cooks a dish, but you’ll have the best meal in your life.

It’s quite different when cooking to create recipes rather than to just cook instinctively for the pleasure of it. I write down what I’m doing when I’m cooking a dish. Then I have that set of instructions that I’ve written down. There is no guarantee that it is going to be the same with you. The recipe is purely a moment in time where I report what happened on that particular day, at that particular temperature.

When I give the recipe to you, you are faced with a typewritten page that you have to abide by, which is the opposite of the freedom that I had when I created the recipe. However, I tell people, when you make a recipe, you should do exactly as the recipe said, to do justice to whoever did it. If it works out, you’re likely to do it again, but the second time you will take a faster look. By the third or the fourth time, you will improve the recipe by adapting it to your personal taste. The recipe is not static, it’s moving. You never have the same chicken exactly, with the same amount of fat.

I teach some classes at Boston University. Everybody wants to be “different.”

That’s an oxymoron because you cannot do the same thing as the person next to you does because you’re not that person. This is one of the paradoxes. I’ll do a roast chicken, buttered potatoes, and a salad. Then they all go to the stove with an hour and a half to redo it. I tell them, “Do not try to blow my mind, by doing something different. You don’t have to, because I have 15 students and will end up with 15 distinct chickens today. You cannot be the same as the person next to you. So don’t torture yourself to be different. Just cook with your gut and you will be different than the person next to you.”

You appeared on Top Chef, where you mentioned that your ideal final meal would be roast squab and fresh peas. I was curious as to why that?

Well, you know, fresh baby peas right out of the garden cooked with a small lettuce, tiny pearl white onions, butter and a dash of sugar and salt—Peas à la Française—it’s extraordinary. And I love squab roasted properly.

To tell you the truth, “What would be the last meal of your life?” is really a stupid question because if you know you’re going to die, you probably don’t have much of an appetite! I said the greatest bread and the greatest butter that I can think of—it’s hard to beat bread and butter. So, of course, when I said that, they said, “Well, that’s great, but that’s not enough.” So then, all right: squab and peas. (For Chef Pépin’s recipe, see http://cookingforgeeks.com/book/peas/.)

So good, good bread; good butter.

Extraordinary bread and extraordinary butter. Yes. Hard to beat.

Smoked Paprika, Chickpea, and Cilantro Chicken

This recipe, based on one originally printed in Bon Appétit magazine, was recently introduced to me and has become a regular dish. It’s easy to cook and makes great leftovers. It’s still impressive when you are cooking for others!

Preheat oven to 450°F / 230°C. In a large bowl, mix together:

In a small serving bowl, measure out ¼ cup (60g) plain yogurt. Transfer 1 teaspoon of the spice mixture from the large bowl into the small serving bowl and mix to combine. Set on table for use as a topping.

In the large bowl, add:

Toss to combine. Line a cookie sheet or baking pan with parchment paper (less cleaning!), transfer the ingredients, and spread out into a thin layer. Bake for 20–25 minutes. Sprinkle 1/2 cup (30g) chopped cilantro or flat parsley on top.

Deborah Madison on Eating Alone

Deborah was the founding chef of Greens Restaurant in San Francisco, California, and is the author of many books on vegetarian cooking. In 2009, she coauthored the book What We Eat When We Eat Alone (Gibbs Smith) with her husband, artist Patrick McFarlin.

What did you discover about how people cook when it’s just themselves?

We interviewed lots of people and began to see that people fell into categories. A woman who’s got small kids and a husband and finds herself home alone may make a bowl of oatmeal and eat it in the bathtub while listening to music. That’s very different from somebody who is eating alone day after day and makes something that’s healthful, delicious, and works for them. There’s a difference between people who are older, widowers or widows, compared to someone in school who’s simply tired of sandwiches. Then there are people who like to cook, who value good food and the experience of cooking. They have a whole other set of thoughts about cooking for themselves. Men are different from women a lot of times. Men tend to make a big thing and eat it all week long. This one bartender we talked to made a flank steak rolled with cheese and bacon. He was very proud of it and gave us the recipe. It served a lot of folks and that was his eat-alone food, so when he made it, he ate it all week.

I do have to say peanut butter was the most frequently mentioned eat-alone food. Peanut butter in all kinds of ways, many of them gross. A peanut butter sandwich with mayonnaise and fried onions and potato chips in it—you know, just crazy things. But people found their own taste. One woman made the most delicious plate of asparagus with torn bread and good olive oil and sharp vinegar. It’s a recipe I’ve used a lot and really like.

It sounds like some people get really creative when no one’s looking.

People come up with what they like to eat alone. I think some are very proud of it, even the gross bits, and it works for them. They’re getting themselves fed. Others feel guilty that they don’t do more. People have very different values around cooking for themselves. One man talked about going into the kitchen and making lunch: “I look for vegetables and I always use the old, tired vegetables first,” because he felt sorry for them. He takes these old, tired vegetables and something else and makes a sandwich. That was his routine and it didn’t sound like it varied a lot, but it worked for him. He was satisfied. He wanted to use up those vegetables; it was important to him.

What things about cooking alone surprised you?

What really delighted me was some of the young people we talked with. They were quite serious about cooking and they came to it for various reasons. This one medical student said he just couldn’t look at another Subway meatball sandwich. He went in for cooking lessons from his mother every Sunday. And then he was thrilled because he had the power to give a dinner party, and you can’t do that with a Subway sandwich. He said, “You know, it’s a lot like working in a lab. There are lots of things you’re paying attention to at once,” so he really enjoyed it. He loved being able to cook for his friends.

Another young person we talked to started to cook because he didn’t like the way his parents cooked. He wanted to be in charge. As he started to cook he found he could make those choices, which I thought was kind of sweet and amusing, and also effective because he learned to cook.

One woman said that when her kids were teenagers, but before they got super busy, she had them cook a meal one day a week. They had to do it all. She let them make mistakes, like not starting the brown rice until 15 minutes before dinner, so things didn’t come out at the same time. But she said they really learned that way and for her it was wonderful to come home at the end of a long workday and smell food cooking in the house. She said it was a great experience and when they finally grew up and left home, they had some basic survival skills. They could cook something.

One-Hour French Onion Soup

A large chef’s knife, a cutting board, and a huge bag of onions: the perfect way to learn how to slice, dice, chop, and peel. If you’ve never made French onion soup, it’s easy if you have good knife technique. For a lovely demonstration of “the dog work” of knife technique and cutting onions, see the “Your Own French Onion Soup” episode of Julia Child’s The French Chef: http://cookingforgeeks.com/book/onionsoup/. While some things have changed—better metallurgy in knives, for one—the fundamental techniques haven’t. Watching her cook and teach is a joy.

Earlier recipes for soupe à l’oignon, like one from 1651, call for either water or beef broth; another old one suggests adding capers on top after cooking. Julia Child’s version calls for homemade chicken and beef stock, but while you should make your own stock at some point (see page 350), it takes more time than most of us have for an evening meal. My version here uses vegetable broth (I prefer the taste) and puts a microwave (“Imagine that!”) to clever use.

Set out a cutting board and, next to it, a large microwave-safe container for sliced onions. Add 4 tablespoons (60g) of butter to the container.

Slice 4-6 large yellow onions, about 2 pounds (900g). Start by cutting the root and stem ends off, slicing in half (top to bottom), and then peeling off the skin. Make sure to remove any tough outer layer, as it’ll end up in your soup. Chop the onion halves into slices, transferring to the container as needed to free up space on your cutting board.

Now for the unorthodox part. Cooking onions on the stovetop is a thermal balancing act between getting the stove hot enough to simmer the onions in their own liquid but keeping it cool enough to not dry them out and burn them. Microwaving onions may sound crazy, but it nails this balancing act perfectly: the microwave heats the water in the onions, causing them to simmer, but doesn’t excite the drier parts and thus doesn’t burn them. It still takes as long—30 to 45 minutes—but it’s astonishingly simple.

Microwave the onions and butter for 15 minutes on high power, then stir them together. The onions should be translucent and wilted at this point, but not brown. Fetch out any bits of onion skin that accidentally made it in while you’re at it. Nuke for another 15 minutes. Stir again, and again fetch out any bits of onion skin that somehow made it in. The onions should be getting smaller in volume at this point, and perhaps beginning to turn brown. Microwave for additional 5-minute intervals until the onions have reduced way down and are mahogany brown.

Transfer the onions to a pot and stir in:

Taste and adjust the seasoning as desired, taking care to not oversalt the liquid as the cheese will balance that out. You can store the soup at this point for several days in the fridge.

To serve, bring the soup to a simmer. Ladle it into oven-safe soup bowls (or a shallow oven-safe pan, if you’re serving family-style) and cover it with slices of dried, toasted bread. (Do not skip drying and toasting the bread; you will end up with soggy wet goo. You can use stale bread and toast it; otherwise, dry the slices of bread out in a 300°F / 150°C oven and then toast them.)

Cover the bread with a generous layer of sliced cheese that melts well, such as Gruyère, Fontina, or Emmental, creating a layer of ⅛” / 0.5 cm cheese slices across the entire top.

Melt and toast the cheese under a broiler, cooking it until a few spots are just on the verge of burning.

Buck Raper on Knives

PHOTOS USED BY PERMISSION OF BUCK RAPER

Buck Raper is the manager of manufacturing and engineering for Dexter-Russell, the largest and oldest cutlery manufacturer in the United States. Above, Buck holds a knife next to an edge sharpness and edge life test apparatus in the metallurgy lab.

How did you come to work at Dexter-Russell?

In a former life, I was working on a doctorate in synthetic organic chemistry.

Wow. What happened?

I got drafted to Vietnam.

And then you came back...

I came back and there weren’t many job opportunities for PhD chemists, and I was still looking at two more years in school, and I had a family to support. So I went and got an MBA and got twice the starting salary I would have gotten as a PhD. My family had always been in the cutlery business—my grandfather and my father—and all I ever heard was knife talk. When I was a Baby Buck, my father would take me into the pocketknife factory on Saturday mornings and hand me off to a foreman so he could get some work done, and I’d make knives with a foreman.

Did the background in chemistry, combined with your family’s history in knife making, complement each other?

To some degree... but it was more of the scientific method and analytical techniques that you learn in a hard science, applying them to manufacturing. I looked at it from a different standpoint than a history major MBA would, or an English major MBA would. Coming from a real science, you take a different approach, an engineering approach.

Can you give me an example?

Much of the heat treating, the grinding, and the choice of steels was done almost by folklore. It’s always been done that way and nobody remembers why. Now when we’re trying to choose a steel for a particular application, we do some testing, make some blades, and try them out to see what the results are. We have a control sample and record data. That’s the type of change that I made. Dexter-Russell is 192 years old, and we still have machinery and tooling that we were using at the turn of the century, from 1900. Those techniques still work and they’re still very good, but nobody really knew why we were doing things the way we were doing them.

What surprised you when you were testing the folklore?

We’re number one in professional oyster knives, and there’s the chronic problem with the tips of oyster knives breaking off. We had a heat-treatment process that we thought was making the steel hard enough to not break. The theory was if the blade is breaking, make it harder, and then the tip won’t break off. The reality was what we needed to do was to make tougher steel. So we changed our heat treatment process to create a tougher, softer steel.

What does it mean for a steel to be tough versus hard?

It’s a trade-off to hold an edge. The harder the steel is, the better it will hold an edge. But you also want to have some flexibility. If you need a flexible bone or fillet knife, a harder steel is more brittle; it would fracture. So you have to trade off the hardness for the toughness that allows you some flexibility. The toughness also gives you wearability, resistance to abrasion. One way an edge fails is that you literally wear away the grains of steel, and to resist that, you’re looking for a tough steel.

When you heat-treat steel, you martenize it to the temperature that’s going to give you the maximum hardness. [Martensite is a type of crystalline structure in metal formed by rapid changes in temperature.] But if you underheat it, if you undercook it a little bit, it comes out tougher. If you overcook it, it’s also tough, but then it corrodes. In our case, when we’re talking heat-treatable stainless 400 series steel, the optimum temperature is 1,934°F / 1,057°C. If you heat it to 1,950°F / 1,066°C, you get the same hardness that you would if you heat it to 1,920°F / 1,049°C, but one is tougher, and the other will corrode.

Steel is formed of grains. If you were to snap a knife blade in half, and look at it with the naked eye, the texture would look like fine cement inside the knife. What you’re seeing is groups of grains. Steel exists in 9 or 10 different phases. Depending on how it’s been processed, temperature-wise, it has a mixture of these various phases, and that determines the toughness of the steel. I use the analogy of baking a cake when I’m explaining heat treatment. You have raw dough and expose it to heat. There’s a chemical change and a phase change, and you go from slurry to a porous solid once it’s baked.

With steel, once it is heated to a critical temperature, cooling—called quenching—is also critical. You’ve probably seen old movies where the blacksmith is pounding away; when he gets the iron hot, he plunges it into the water and there’s a hiss of steam. The reason for that is the rapid cooling. In the case of stainless steel, you have to get it below 1,350°F / 732°C in less than three minutes in order to maintain the phase that you want. If you cool it slower, you get a different mixture of phases in the steel. So it’s not just in bringing it up to temperature; the cooling curve is key.

Steel is also determined by the alloy. There are two or three dozen different types of stainless cutlery steels, and stainless cutlery steels are just a very small subset of alloyed steels. Alloyed steels are a subset of carbon steels. And all the heat-treatment processes are determined by which alloy you’re working with.

Are there other types of steels that you would want to use for particular purposes for knife making?

We want to use a stainless steel, although carbon steel makes wonderful knives. Everybody likes their old carbon steel knives, but nowadays, with the National Sanitation Foundation and other regulatory bodies, you can’t use carbon steel knives in most restaurants. We choose stainless, which has chromium in it; the chromium makes it stainless. You also have to have carbon in the steel so that you can harden it. You add more carbon if you want to create a harder blade, and more chromium if you need to get more corrosion resistance. When you heat-treat it, you want to come out with a very fine texture, and things like molybdenum, vanadium, tungsten, and cobalt help you get a fine grain. Tungsten and cobalt help make the steel tougher.

What’s the rationale prohibiting carbon knives in restaurants?

They rust, and rust is iron oxide. It’s dirty, and where the blade has rusted, there are pits that will retain grease. The grease will breed bacteria. It’s usually controlled by city or state or county ordinance.

Carbon steel versus stainless steel: which is better?

That was a classic question that I wondered about for 30 years. I finally had a seminar with a metallurgist from a French steel mill, and he developed a machine to test the sharpness of edges and the life of edges. The answer is that you can get a carbon steel edge about 5% sharper while a stainless steel edge will last about 5% longer. With stainless steel being tougher, it is harder to create the edge, so stainless steel often gets a bad reputation because people can’t sharpen it correctly. It is possible to get carbon steel 5% sharper, but you would never perceive that using a knife. You need the scientific apparatus to bring out that difference. The practical difference is it’s very easy to bring up an edge on carbon steel, so most people’s carbon steel knives are sharper because they’re easier to resharpen. A carbon steel knife responds very easily to a butcher’s steel; you have to work a little bit more with a stainless steel knife.

I’m going to ask the question that’ll probably lead to the gates of hell: how do I sharpen a knife correctly?

There are lots of ways to do it. Probably the best general-purpose way and what I recommend to people is to use a diamond sharpening steel. The traditional serrated butcher’s steel is a ½” or 5/8” rod (1.2–1.6 cm) with ridges running longitudinally. Those are now being replaced by rods that are plated with diamond. The diamond rod brings up an edge very quickly, because it’s hard enough to remove metal, creating a new edge.

An edge is actually a whole bunch of little burrs, sort of like hacksaw teeth that are standing up, perpendicular to the back of the blade. When you cut, those little burrs (here we call them feathers) roll over. The first thing that happens when you swipe with a butcher’s steel is you stand those feathers up, and you have a real good edge. After a time, they bend back and forth. They work-harden and break off, like breaking a wire by twisting it until it work-hardens and snaps. Then you have to create a new edge, new burrs, and the grit on a diamond steel is perfect for that. That’s what the long serrations do on your regular butcher’s steel, but it’s a lot easier to do with a diamond steel. When you run a knife edge along a steel, you stand up the burrs, and you start thinning down the edge. I can do it with the back of a porcelain plate, or I can rub a knife on a brick wall and bring up the edge, but a diamond steel is best.

I’ve made a lot of trips to China, and they have very primitive kitchens as far as equipment, tools, and utensils go. They make do with the one basic knife. People call it a cleaver, but it’s not really a cleaver. It’s a slicer and a spatula and a scraper and everything else, but with that one knife, they stop and squat on the floor and bring the edge back on a brick that’s in the floor. They keep those knives very, very sharp. I learned in Chinese cooking how nicely things are sliced up counts as much as the taste, the presentation, and the freshness of ingredients. All of that can be ruined if you have cut raggedy chunks.

I would recommend either a diamond butcher’s steel or a whetstone. But a whetstone takes more skill, more training to use. I would stay away from electric sharpeners.

At some point the burrs snap off, and I presume that’s the point at which one needs to actually grind down the edge of the knife to form a new edge?

With a diamond steel, you’re doing grinding at the same time you’re straightening up the edge. A traditional butcher’s steel isn’t hard enough to remove metal. The deal with using a butcher’s steel is your steel has to be harder than the metal of the blade you’re sharpening. Otherwise, you get nowhere, like using a common file to smooth or shape metal. Your file won’t cut the metal if the file isn’t harder than the metal it’s cutting. If you let your knife get very dull, bringing the edge back is a real bear. If you give it a few strokes on a butcher’s steel every other day, or once a week, or every time you go to put the knife in the drawer, then the knife is always ready.

At what point is a knife effectively used up? [Buck shares with me the photo shown below.] I cannot believe how much the bottom knife has been sharpened away compared to the new knife on top. What’s the story with this actual knife?

Whoever was resharpening that knife was very, very good. It came back to our customer service people for replacement from a mom-and-pop butcher shop. I train our sales force, and one of the questions they ask is how long is a knife useful. I show them this. That’s pushing the ridiculous. I would think that that knife had seen about five or six years of service.

We usually find in a restaurant that a knife is good for six to nine months. With professional cutlery, and in particular with packing houses, they’ll need a wide blade for breaking down a side of beef. They need a large curved knife, which we call a cimeter steak knife. When it starts out life, it’s about 2 ½” (6 cm) wide, and when it gets down to about 1” or 1 ¼” (2.5–3 cm) wide, it’s no longer suitable for breaking down the big sides of beef. So then they use it for the smaller cuts, and call it a breaking knife. When they wear it down to about under an inch, they use it as a boning knife.

So these knives actually go through a series of different lives? As they get smaller from sharpening, they get repurposed and reused?

They get narrower, and they get shorter. People find different applications for them. The poultry industry still does that. What I’m talking about is mostly pre-WWII. After WWII, people started coming to us and saying, “Hey, can’t you make this shape from scratch?” So we started to create the same shape as the worn-out knife. You wouldn’t have to wear out a giant cimeter; you could just buy a breaking knife off the shelf. A lot of our traditional knife shapes have evolved from large blades that were worn down and used for different applications, and then we started making a blade with that shape.

What advice would you give somebody new to the kitchen?

If I were being a smartass, I would tell you don’t run with a knife. Keep your knives out of the dishwasher. Wipe them clean with a damp rag. When you put them in the dishwasher, they bang together and you nick up your edges. If you do put them in the dishwasher, make sure you pull them right out of the basket and dry them off. Keep up with your sharpening; don’t let your knife get dull. Maintain the edge every time you use it or every other time you use it. Give it one or two strokes on a steel and sharpening will never be a chore, and you will always have a sharp knife.

Adam Ried on Kitchen Equipment

PHOTO BY ANDREW BARANOWSKI

Adam Ried writes the Boston Globe Magazine’s cooking column and appears as the kitchen equipment specialist on the PBS series America’s Test Kitchen. His personal website is http://www.adamried.com.

How did you end up writing for the Globe and working at America’s Test Kitchen?

I didn’t intend to be involved in food for a living. I went to school for architecture. I was quick to realize that a) I never should have been admitted to architecture school, and b) even though I was admitted, it would be a grave mistake for me to pursue it, because to quote Barbie, “Math is hard.”

So I was doing marketing for architecture firms. I spent a whole lot of time cruising cookbooks, making dinners, and having friends over, but the lightbulb hadn’t quite gone off. I would come in every Monday morning after a weekend of cooking, and regale my officemates with the various things that I had tried, and how they worked, and what I wanted to change. One day, someone just looked at me and said, “What are you doing here? Why don’t you just go to cooking school?” I mean, talk about feeling like a doofus. It had never gelled for me, even though my sister had been to cooking school, and my whole family cooks. I promptly quit my job and went to the Boston University Culinary Certificate Program.

At one point, I was in the office of the director, and there was another woman waiting in the office to speak with her. The woman and I struck up a conversation. She had done the program a year or two before me. She was an editor at Cook’s Illustrated, which I read, but again, doofus moment, it had never registered that it was just down the street in Brookline. I started talking to her about what her job was and how she liked it. Then and there, I decided that I wanted to write about food instead of actually cooking it.

I was on the poor woman and just kept after her for a freelance assignment here and there. That finally snowballed into a real job at Cook’s Illustrated. This was in the early 1990s. I remember being in school thinking, “Oh, God, I don’t want to work on the line in a restaurant. That’s too hard. I’m too old. I don’t like the heat. What am I going to do?” It’s one of those incredibly irritating “right place, right time” stories that you never want to hear when you’re on the other end of it.

From the perspective of cooking in the kitchen, what has turned out to matter more than you expected?

This sounds a little geeky, but the thing that I didn’t realize going into it, especially because I don’t have a scientific mind, was that understanding some of the science behind cooking is important. Leavening is still an uphill battle for me to understand. All these recipes rely primarily on baking powder, but sometimes include a little baking soda. Really understanding the acid neutralization in baking soda as an ingredient and what ingredients are acidic is not something that they really teach you in cooking school.

What turned out to be less important?

Not to shoot myself in the foot here, but kitchen tools. You really don’t need every conceivable tool to cook well.

What would you consider to be the few basic tools a kitchen needs?

Certainly a chef’s knife. A serrated knife is also really useful. A good, heavy aluminum core sauté pan is important. You can do a million different things in it: sauté obviously, braise, shallow fry, roast, bake... A good strainer, measuring cups, and spoons are useful. I love bowls that have the measurements on them so you can get the volume as you are mixing. I have an immersion blender that I use a ton. I would not want to go anywhere without my immersion blender. I use the food processor quite a bit. I have a standing mixer, but I could probably get away with a hand mixer for most of what I do. Those are some of the basics.

What’s your overall approach when you look at a piece of kitchen gear?

I do my best to dump all preconceptions. Because I have had years of experience in the area and exposure to the various tools and talked to various experts, I automatically know what I’m looking for. But I have to try and let go of that stuff and do the test as objectively as possible, because I may be surprised.

I remember testing grill pans that had ridges in the bottom, which are supposed to create the visual effect of real grill marks. I’m a big cast iron pan man. I like cast iron, and one of the pans in the line-up was a cast iron grill pan. Even doing my best to drop the preconceptions, I still thought, “It’s going to be fabulous.” In fact, it did heat up reasonably evenly, and it retained its heat. It made good grill marks. But I was surprised by the fact that it was a pain to clean because of the shape and placement of the ridges. Gunk would collect between them. I try not to use detergent and abrasives on cast iron, because I want to care for the seasoning. If I have really stuck-on gunk, I get in there with coarse salt and a stiff brush, and there just wasn’t enough room for the salt to really do its thing. After cleaning it twice, I swore I would never use it again.

What’s your process for going from a first version, or concept, to a final recipe for a Boston Globe article?

I’ve never really shaken the cook’s process, so I probably research and test more than I have to. For instance, I’m currently working on fruitcake for a Christmas holiday column. I start by looking online. I have a whole bunch of cookbooks at home, and I also make liberal use of all the libraries in our area. So I’ll look at as many fruitcake recipes as I can, say 40 or 50, or whatever is practical given my deadline. I will make a little chart for myself, just a quick handwritten thing, of the types and variables in a fruitcake recipe. Then I overlay my own food sensibilities. For example, what color scheme I want, what ratio of batter to fruit and nuts I want, what shapes, and so forth.

I will do what I call “cobbling together” a recipe. I’ll give it a try. I convene my tasters and we taste it and analyze it. There’s no such thing as a casual, thoughtless meal in this house. I want feedback on pretty much every bite that everyone puts in his or her mouth. Then I’ll go back and make it a second time. If I’m really, really lucky, I can nail it on the second try. More often than not, I will make it a third time. It’s a constant process of critique and analysis.

Are there cases where you just get stuck and can’t figure out why it’s not working?

I’m really lucky to have worked in the food world for long enough that I know a lot of people, much smarter than I am, who I can always call with questions. Actually, for one of my first columns for the Globe, I was doing a thing on mangos and I wanted to do mango bread. I was trying to get the leavening right. There was some molasses in there, and some puréed mangos, and this question of baking powder and baking soda came up. I ended up calling a million different bakers to help me understand the role of the baking powder and how it affected the browning.

I’ve been known to scrap recipes if they don’t work the way I want them to after the third or fourth try, or if it doesn’t taste as good as I want it to. But I don’t remember being so stuck in a problem that I wasn’t able to work it out without the help of many smart people.

Has there ever been a case where you’ve published a recipe, and in hindsight, said “oops,” or where the reaction was unexpected?

Oh, God, yes. It’s really difficult to please all of the people all of the time. I remember publishing one recipe early on and when I went back and looked at it a couple of years later, I thought, “What the hell was I thinking? That is just as convoluted as can be.”

Have any of your recipes caught you off guard by how well liked they were?

There was a lemony quinoa pilaf and asparagus with shrimp scampi recipe that I did. I had discussed quinoa off and on with my editor for a while, because I really like it. Now it’s in pretty much any supermarket, but at the point I was writing this recipe it was new to me. People loved it. I got so much positive response from readers on that one.

Lemony Quinoa and Asparagus with Shrimp Scampi

Adjust the oven rack to the center position, place an ovenproof serving dish on the rack, and heat the oven to 200°F / 95°C. In a large nonstick sauté pan set over medium heat, heat 2 tablespoons (30 mL) of oil and 1 tablespoon (15g) of butter. Add the onion and cook until soft, about 5 minutes. Add the quinoa and cook, stirring constantly, until it smells toasty, about 4 minutes. Add 2¾ cups (650 mL) of water and 1 teaspoon (6g) of salt, increase the heat to high, and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer until the quinoa is just tender, about 12 minutes. Off heat, sprinkle the asparagus over the quinoa, replace the cover, and set the pan aside until the quinoa has absorbed all of the liquid and the asparagus is tender, about 12 minutes. Add the lemon zest and juice, season with black pepper and additional salt, if desired, and stir. Transfer the quinoa to the warmed serving dish, spread it out to make a bed, and place it in the oven to keep warm.

Wipe out the sauté pan with a paper towel, add 1 tablespoon (15 mL) of oil, and set it over high heat. When the oil just begins to smoke, add half of the shrimp and cook them, without moving them, until they begin to turn opaque, about a minute. Quickly turn the shrimp and cook them until they’re fully opaque, about 45 seconds longer, then transfer them to a bowl. Add the remaining 1 tablespoon (15 mL) of oil to the pan, and repeat the process to cook the remaining shrimp. Add the remaining 2 tablespoons (30g) of butter to the pan and place it over medium-low heat. When the butter has melted, add the garlic and cook, stirring constantly, until fragrant, about 45 seconds. Add the wine and a pinch of cayenne and stir to blend. Return the shrimp and any accumulated juices to the pan, add the parsley, season with salt to taste, and stir to combine. Remove the serving dish from the oven, pour the shrimp and its juices over the bed of quinoa, and serve at once.

RECIPE USED BY PERMISSION OF ADAM RIED; ORIGINALLY RAN IN THE MAY 18, 2008, ISSUE OF THE BOSTON GLOBE MAGAZINE