Tag Archives: cooking

October 23, 2015 · 9:18 am

On Cooking

This Foodie Friday, I’d like to take a moment to express my appreciation for what goes on in my kitchen.  I know for many of you, time spent there is a painful, sometimes bloody, reminder that cooking is a chore.  I don’t see it that way, and as I’m thinking about it I’m realizing that there is some business thinking that goes along with my point of view.

I love cooking.  It’s therapeutic in many ways to me.  Even though one rule in my kitchen is that an appropriate form of music is playing (as loudly as I can get away with) as I cook, it’s actually quiet.  Appropriate music, by the way, is something that corresponds to the food being cooked: zydeco when I’m cooking Cajun, country when we’re making barbecue, and the Big Night soundtrack when an Italian meal is in the offing.  Try it – your food will be better!

Back to the quiet.  Most of us have a hundred thoughts rattling around.  It’s the collateral damage of our multitasking world.  When I’m cooking, I have one focus at a time – doing my mise en place or the smells as a dish is cooking.  How often have you taken the time out of your busy business day – even 30 seconds – to do something similar?

I appreciate the physical act of cooking, just as I appreciate that I’m constantly learning, finding better ways to do things, and getting better.  I don’t like making mistakes, but I do learn from them and rarely make the same one a second time. Those are the business points too.  My cooking is improving because of experience, not because I took a few years to go to culinary school.  I have friends who did, and they’ll tell you that the reality of the restaurant kitchen is nothing like the CIA.  It’s the same with every young person, fresh out of business school.  Doing beats almost everything.

I read someplace that kitchens are where we create community, and food is all about community.  I like to think of business that way too – a community of my team, the other teams that make up our enterprise, and the customers, partners, and suppliers that make up the community as a whole.  What are your thoughts?

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September 25, 2015 · 9:03 am

Searing Off The Truth

Our Foodie Friday Fun this week revolves around searing meat.  One thing I was told early on in my cooking education was to sear off meat before using it in a dish.  This would have the effect of locking in the juices so that the meat doesn’t get dry during cooking.  I guess this was cooking “knowledge” that had been put forth a hundred or so years before I heard it.  If you’ve ever heard the term “cauterization” you’ll understand the thinking.  Just as a doctor can cauterize a wound, burning the flesh to seal it shut, so too did a cook lock in juices by searing off the meat, creating a barrier that kept the meat moist.  

If you go back in cooking history, you hear this “truism” repeated over and over.  As you can tell from my use of quotation marks, the truism isn’t remotely true.  No, this is not going to be another screed about not trusting all the so-called truths, especially not in a world where everything you knew yesterday might not be true today.  Instead, I’d like us to think about how a food scientist named Harold McGee figured out that the “truth” wasn’t.

I’ll quote from a book called The Food Lab (which, by the way, is quite a wonderful read if you’re a combination of geek and cook):

You’d think that with all that working against him, McGee must have used the world’s most powerful computer, or at the very least a scanning electron microscope, to prove his assertion, right? Nope. His proof was as simple as looking at a piece of meat. He noticed that when you sear a steak on one side, then flip it over and cook it on the second side, juices from the interior of the steak are squeezed out of the top—the very side that was supposedly now impermeable to moisture loss!

In other words, he looked at the facts and came to his own conclusion about things.  He didn’t rely on what others had to say on the matter; he gathered his own information and came to his own conclusions based on what he could observe with his own eyes.  The answer was staring him in the face.

That’s how we all need to be doing things in business (and, with an election looming, in the non-business world too!).  We need to be open to the answers that become obvious as we look into things ourselves.  Who knows – we might lose some intellectual baggage while gaining valuable insight.  Worth a shot?

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September 4, 2015 · 8:45 am

Meatheads

It’s the last Foodie Friday of Summer.  Well, officially, at least.  Most of us will be grilling in the warmth for at least another month and then we’ll move the party indoors.  I don’t know what you’re grilling this weekend, but here at Rancho Deluxe some sort of meat will be involved.  While we have vegans and vegetarians in our household, some of us are unabashedly carnivorous.  I thought this might be a good time to put forth a few of the absolute truisms we all know about cooking meat.  There’s a business point too.

Beef and Corn on a Charcoal BBQ grill

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Let me just list a bunch.  These come from the website amazingribs.com which is focused on all meats, not just ribs and is well worth a few moments of your time:

Searing seals in juices. Pink pork is undercooked. If there is red in chicken it is undercooked. If you’re lookin’ you ain’t cookin’. Cooking time depends on the weight of the meat. The bone adds flavor. Oil the grates before putting food on them. Flip burgers only once. The Stall (note: – this is a BBQ term and is the point at which cooking seems to stop for a while) is collagen melting. High heat is the best heat. Whole chicken tastes better than chicken cut into parts. Beer can chicken is the best chicken. Melting fat penetrates the meat. Grilling causes cancer. Grill marks are important. Medium and medium rare are the same thing. Stainless steel grills are better. Cast iron grates are the best. You can rely on your grill’s built in thermometer. Ground beef is the riskiest food for pathogens. Barbecue sauce is always red. Marinades add a lot of moisture to meat.

I’m sure you’ve heard or said one of more of the above.  Here is the thing – none of them are true.  I know – it’s like I just told you the Easter Bunny is made up.  Sorry, but just because you believe it to be true doesn’t make it so.  When food scientists looked into these “truths” and others, they found the facts to be something quite different.  Which is the business point, of course.

We hear “truth” all the time in business.  I wonder how often we actually take the time to look into whether we’re just subscribing to a shared myth.  I think it’s incumbent on each of us to do so.  My guess is that we’ll find, more often than not, that the truth isn’t exactly as it’s been presented.  A word of caution.  You can expect people to react badly when you give them proof that their facts and THE facts aren’t the same.  Be judicious and tactful or do so wearing running shoes.

Enjoy the weekend and use a digital thermometer.  You really can’t tell how done something is my touch, you know…

 

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