The Why of Cooking (2017)

I have to say that your first statement seems totally ridiculous...do you really think that homo sapiens is homo economicus?? People are not rational optimizers, they're mammals. I'm sure I'm being a bit uncharitable to your claim here but your comment makes you sound like you actually are the 'older, wiser' economist in that old joke: "Two economists, one young and one old, are walking to lunch. The young economist looks down and sees a $20 bill on the street and says, 'Hey, look a twenty-dollar bill!' Without even looking, his older and wiser colleague replies, 'Nonsense. If there had been a twenty-dollar lying on the street, someone would have already picked it up by now.'"

As to your second paragraph...have you considered the possibility that you, specifically, didn't do a good job of cooking for yourself and that the fact that you failed to cook this way could be, well, your failure (to plan or execute or whatever), rather than a global failure of the idea "cook for yourself and use fresh produce"?

As for farm shares, many/most CSAs deliver, either to the home or to a central location in town (often a local co-op). So it is, in fact just one delivery truck driving down the highway.

And to your final paragraph, I simply say that that is an utter failure of imagination. At the moment, it's absolutely true that participating in this kind of eating & cooking demands some flexibility of schedule. Mostly, wealthier people are the ones who eat this way. Now, why is that the case? Well, our entire food production and distribution system is built around a different model. Deviating from that model, given the current state of the system, is expensive. That doesn't mean that people with the power and resources to do so shouldn't actively work towards changing the system into somethign more sustainable and accessible for all. In fact, in NYC there is an incredible farmer's market (called "greenmarket"), which runs in several poor neighborhoods and accepts food stamps, and it's life-changing for many people. I think that if you spoke to a few of the people who shop there, you'd never be as offhandedly dismissive of "eat fresh produce & cook for yourself" as you are here.

Proper shopping and meal prep would eliminate most waste when cooking for two. A lot of perishables are sold by weight so even if, say, the scallions are bundled by the dozen, you only have to buy two not the whole dozen. Also, pick recipes that have perishables in common so that you can be sure to use them all up. Finally, use your freezer. You can, for example, blanch extra veggies that you get on sale and freeze them.

It takes practices, but that is part of learning.

Actually, our modern food system isn't working for the hundreds of millions of us who are dying from obesity, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc. Nor is it working for those of us (all of us) who are presently going bankrupt trying to pay for each other's healthcare.

My grad school advice, as a PhD who is not good with rules:

- Understand what the rules are, why they are in place, and to whom they matter. Some are there to keep you from hurting yourself, some to keep you from hurting those on your level or below, some to keep your advisor from abusing you, and a lot to make sure you act in the best interest of the University via minimizing its liability, etc. You don't need to follow all of them all the time, but have some real justification when you do go off course, don't call attention to it, and don't screw anyone else over.

- For your research, you need a dual-prong strategy of making sure you check off the boxes for others, i.e. actually doing what your advisor got funded to do (she is on the hook for this for most grants), on time and under budget as well; then, pour all the rest of your efforts into researching what you are interested in, with an eye towards building your skill sets for the future and learning how to learn alone. Read widely enough to know the range of options for a solution space and deeply enough to know what has actually been tried in your field, and not just what has succeeded. Teach yourself stuff that your advisors don't know. The payoff from a broad familiarity with programming, statistics and discrete mathematics is large, especially if they're under-utilized in your field, and these skills are widely transferable. Furthermore experimenting/exploration through computing is often super cheap and the cost of failure is low, unlike destructive analysis of your physical samples.

- Keep your datasets small enough that you can master them. In the natural sciences, many scientists just want more and more data but getting and maintaining data is labor-intensive and has a huge opportunity cost. You don't always learn a lot of transferable skills that way unless you want to be a lab tech forever. The major exception is when obtaining data is primarily observation and measurement, which are really important to building intuition and just noticing subtleties.

> I could never figure out why. [...] long pasta like that should be with an oil/cream based sauce.

You're doing the same thing you are complaining about: Postulating something as an axiom but not even trying to explain why you think it may be the case.

Anyway, as another commenter said, the commonly stated reason for oil in the cooking water is to stop the pasta sticking together. The commonly stated reason against oil in the cooking water is that it coats the pasta and makes it harder for the sauce to stick to it.

Oil in pasta water is a weird thing. It generally helps the pasta not stick, especially after cooking and waiting for sauce. This can be mostly ignored if you stir the pasta often and leave a wooden spoon across the top of the pan (to stop boil-overs). It does add flavor at times.

The main drawback to putting oil in the pasta water or tossing the pasta with oil/butter afterwards is that some pasta sauces won't stick too well to oiled pasta. This may not be such an issue with fattier sauces: cream sauces or something with ground meat, since they already have oils in the sauce. Vegetarian tomato sauces (regardless of fake meat) seem to fare worse.

The solution I came up with (watching many many cooking videos) is different: cook the spaghetti in the sauce for the last minutes. You get the same effect, but less of the oily mouth feel which I did not like. It also helps thicken your tomato sauce.

Also, +1 on `Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking`.

> I could never figure out why.

Pasta cooking in boiling water has a tendency to over boil as the flour is very good at making stable foam that will rise in your pot.

The oil acts as a anti-foaming agent[1] here[2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defoamer [2]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/jctb.2804301...

A better way is to cook pasta in a pan, adding water bit by bit as you would in a risotto (look up "pasta risottata").

In Italy no professional chef I know would allow oil in the boiling pan ("that's what Frenchies do, because they don't know how to cook pasta without making it stick" being the common answer)

In my experience, olive oil helps spaghetti not to stick together, by coating them in oil, while putting them into the water. Also it adds taste after.

hmm, food courts are ok for a couple of weeks, but I find them lacking in variety. I don't think they are a substitution for cooking by yourself.

> You can cook a meal of almost any kind in 30 minutes or less.

So the recipe magically chooses itself?

So the food magically appears in your fridge?

So the dishes magically wash themselves afterwards?

So the left-over ingredients magically use themselves up?

I really hate when people downplay the time cost involved in food preparation by focussing on only one step of the procedure.

> I would add that you lack cooking knowledge and ability. If you knew how, you wouldn't say such things.

There are a lot of things in life that people know how to do but still hate...

I might know how to drive to work for 45 minutes everyday, I can do it, I can do it well, I can still hate it because it's a waste of time that I'd rather be using for something else.

Hell, people do jobs to earn a living that they're entirely competent at but still hate.

So no, knowing how to do something doesn't automatically mean you don't hate it, does it?

I know how to cook, on the whole I really enjoy it and I'm even pretty good at it. But the fact that I know I'm required to start doing it every single day as soon as I get home from work, mainly to satisfy other people, no matter if I feel like it or not can really suck joy straight out of it for me. If it was purely upp to me I'd eat out 3-5 days a week and save the cooking for when I wanted to.

I'm a good cook now, but when I was first learning I spent a lot of time and effort trying to find good recipes that didn't seem to difficult, too expensive, too unhealthy, etc. There was a lot to learn! I think a lot of things seem easy in hindsight like that. A lot of recipes didn't go into enough detail for a total newbie. "Brown the meat". Easy now a days, but when I started that meant I had to go down this rabbit hole of figuring out how to do that correctly. In the past few years I had to teach my SO to cook and just properly browning ground beef and chopping it into small bits took a few rounds to get right on his own. What does it really look like when it's "done"? What size should each piece be?

Yes, overall it's definitely going to pay off(even just after a month or two), but I think it's easy to forget there's still a decent barrier to starting. I ate a lot of burnt chicken when I first moved out. :P It took a while to afford the pots, the pans, and eventually the thermometer to fix that vs just eating the cheap banquet meals / boxed food.

I can cook a few meals, and I know a fair amount about cooking because my family are all foodies. I’m just not very motivated to add more to my repertoire, or to actually do it often, because I find the whole thing unenjoyable. I agree it’s not hard, but it’s like washing up - a chore. If I can avoid spending even half an hour doing something I hate, well, that sounds good to me!

My troop had a Heavy Cream Patrol which prided itself on making gourmet food in the backcountry. This usually meant carrying extra equipment, learning to cook well with both backpacking stoves and live fire (more than just boiling water), and spending extra time cooking at night. After hiking all day you are going to sit around the campfire anyway, why not make it a productive period? Plus there is nothing better than a stellar meal and dessert while sitting in a beautiful spot.

Cooking is still a way I relax and one way I show affection to friends and family. There is a certain satisfaction from having a meal where you raised and/or made every item on the table from raw materials. For instance this morning I made my wife and I egg sandwiches with sourdough bread we baked yesterday morning, red pepper jelly we put up last year, onions we grew and stored over winter, bacon we smoked from a hog we helped raise, eggs from some chickens we help take care of, and microgreens we grew in the basement. We (clearly) live in a rural-ish setting so I realize what is possible for us is not possible for those living in a major metro area (except maaaaybe Portland), but aspects of this are possible almost anywhere if you want to try.

Then there is the nerd factor where you can get into the science of cooking a la modernist cuisine and that takes it to a whole other level in engaging with my engineering side....

Are you talking things like buying minced garlic instead of a bulb?

I’d say - you turn up, there’s a big pot of whatever is available that day, and a cheap/flat fee. No choice, inexpensive building, not a social event (fine to go alone), cheap and simple bulk cooking. Almost more like a soup kitchen than a restaurant. More expensive/complex food could be optional or once a week, and yeah, if you want nicer food, go to a restaurant.

I loved Good Eats and was devastated when they canceled it. Brown actually teaches the why to his recipes, not just the how and what. I probably built my cooking kits up from things he recommended and used during each show.

I'm thankful Good Eats is coming back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pf3dwtC2c6c

:-)

An even better technique (I tried lots) is to put the eggs in boiling water for 20-30s before breaking and poaching them. It will start the coagulation process of the egg whites, making it much more viscous when you actually do break them. This causes the egg whites to keep together and not spread in the water too quickly. Result is a nicer, rounder poached egg.

I was underwhelmed by "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat". Good information, great presentation, but not up there with the very best books, IMO.

I like Ruhlman's "Twenty", maybe followed by "Ratio".

"How to Cook without a Book" by Anderson is great, although you probably needwhole rooms in your house for food storage if you took her "what you should have in your pantry" serious.

My most used cookbook is the one my mother gave me and all my relatives when we were living alone for the first time. It's the book she uses at school. It's for special-needs children, so extremely basic and easy, with many, many quirky illustrations.

But it has everything important. Bechamel? Sure. Choux pastry? Yes. But also how to cook potatoes or eggs.

The only infuriating thing in this book is that the index is worse than useless. I know the important recipes' page numbers by heart.

I might pick up that last one. When looking up something I haven't cooked before, I always check seriouseats (or epicurious and a few others), and especially Kenji, as he's never steered me wrong before. Haven't read the book though.

I learned to cook from "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" by Julia Child et al. I still think it's the best instructive cook book I've ever seen (with the exception of some bread books, of which there are numerous incredible examples).