Language and Cooking

An analogy of the how and why of kitchen creativity

A coworker mentioned that she was not what her mother-in-law called “a natural cook”: she could follow a recipe, but she could not deviate from it in the least. I, on the other hand, can pick up on a general technique and seasoning set and go from there – either following the recipe exactly, tweaking it, or using its basic information as a jumping-off point to get completely creative.

While food is as valid a medium for creativity as any other, there are some basic ground rules we must follow. Some of these ground rules ensure that our food is safe to eat: storing certain foods in the refrigerator or freezer, cooking them to a certain temperature (or to specific visual cues, such as “fluids run clear” or “toothpick comes out clean”), and serving hot foods while they are still hot. Others are more STEM-related, such as the ways different ingredients behave when mixed with other ingredients, or heated or cooled in specific ways.

Once you know the ground rules, the rest can be changed to meet your preferences, available time and facilities, and ingredients on hand.

OK, I’ll admit that’s an oversimplification, but the most basic version of “fun with food” is “theme and variations”. If you’re not a music maven, “theme and variations” is where a section of music, the theme (like the verse of a song) is performed several times in different manners (the variations): soft, loud, fast, slow, staccato (short, distinct notes), arpeggiated (preceded by short notes of the chord it’s on), and so on.

In some ways, that still misses the nuance.

Cookbooks, like many technical manuals, have their own vocabulary. Aside from the abbreviations used to indicate quantities of ingredients (as well as some advance preparation, such as peeling a vegetable, beating an egg, sifting flour, or making sure something is cold, room temperature, warm, or boiling), there are the techniques, such as simmering, blanching, sautéing, pan-frying, whipping, folding, and so on.

This vocabulary is something akin to the parts of speech you learn in Language class. A sentence needs a subject (who or what), an action, and an object (who or what is being acted upon). In a recipe, the subject is understood to be the cook, baker, food preparer, or (“traditionally”) housewife or chef. The objects are the ingredients and the mixtures of ingredients as they are prepared (for example, a roux, which is a mixture of onion fried in a small amount of butter, to which flour is added to brown and thicken). The final object, the conclusion of this tale that is called a recipe, is what you end up eating (or serving to your family or bringing to that church dinner).

But that’s just the basic, overt vocabulary: the “I, you, it, we” and “past, present, future, infinitive”. Unless you know what to look for, you miss the styles, the genres, the sense of what that food is – and by this I don’t mean “how to duplicate what I’ve done” but rather the historical and ethnic origins of a food, how the main ingredients, seasonings, and techniques go together like the various cliques in your child’s middle school…

If, for example, you go into any mom-and-pop pizzeria, you will find shakers of oregano, garlic, and crushed red pepper. When these spices hang out with onions, basil, and tomato, they create a taste profile most of us associate with “Italian cuisine”. If you’re missing a recipe for marinara sauce or arrabbiata, this is where to start.

In addition to soy sauce and stir-frying, Chinese-American food (largely adapted from Cantonese cooking) has a go-to seasoning blend called “five spice”. While the actual blend varies from cook to cook, cinnamon, cloves, star anise, and Szechuan peppercorns are common ingredients. Peanut oil, crushed garlic and grated ginger are often used at the start of a stir-fry, while sesame oil is a frequent finishing touch.

Other Asian ingredients in my cupboard include Mirin (a sweet, seasoned Japanese cooking wine) and rice wine vinegar. Adding these to soy sauce creates a basic “Teriyaki” flavor without having to buy still another special sauce.

If you asked me for a “Pumpkin Spice Latte” out of season, I would steep a cinnamon stick and one or two whole cloves in black coffee for a few minutes, and add a quick grating of nutmeg after adding your steamed milk and your sweetener of choice. Or I might add that cinnamon stick as a garnish instead, allowing you to decide how strong you want your drink flavored.

Any decent chef or food historian will tell you that I’ve only given you a basic, “cultural appropriation” level of those seasoning blends and preparations – and they’re right. It’s a “Do-Re-Mi” level of understanding. But just as Maria tells the Von Trapp children, “When you know the notes to sing, you can sing most anything.”

I hope I’ve given you a few culinary themes to inspire your own variations.

New Adventures in Bread

 I managed to spend the entirety of the COVID-19 lockdown hardly baking a thing. Part of the reason was that my sister kept (and still keeps on) filling what little kitchen space we have with all sorts of gadgets she finds at work, and neither she nor the Other Half can find anything in the kitchen unless it is taking up all the working space on the kitchen table. Part of it is, after we account for my sister's stash of orange juice, organic milk, and Vitamin Water in the fridge and her stash of spaghetti sauce in the freezer, there's little place to keep any sort of food for The Other Half and me. Mostly, though, it was because with everything contact-limited, there were prohibitions against bringing home-baked goods anywhere to celebrate (or celebrations at all, for that matter).

I baked my usual Passover sponge cakes, the occasional meat loaf or cottage pie, maybe some knishes or bourrekas, and that was it.

Then again, during my tenure at Michaels, my baking was mostly related to classes I'd taken or taught: first the Wilton cake decorating classes, and later, the holiday cupcake and cookie decorating one-nighters. The rest of it was holiday baking (mostly cookies and cupcakes) and special-event baking (a few major cakes for my STARFLEET group, and an assorted selection of cookies and cupcakes). For the most part, I didn't have time for breads - most of which my sister didn't like, while my Other Half and I were trying to cut down on.

That said, bread has been part of my baking repertoire since my university days. For a while, I would experiment with a different bread recipe almost every week. But bread takes time, and the further away I got from school, the less time (and space) I had in which to make it. Also, places like Whole Foods have made artisan breads available at prices that aren't too excessive for the occasional splurge.

I've been wanting to get back to bread for a while, especially since a lot of the philosophy and science of home bread-baking has changed over the past four decades (wow, has it really been that long?) and along with it, a lot of the ingredients and tools. While I've made the occasional largeish purchase from King Arthur Baking (you're going to see them pop up a lot during this post!), a lot of their ingredients and tools are a bit pricey for my budget. As it turned out, Temu — love them or hate them (market-busting prices on merchandise mass-produced in China) — was the key to picking up an inexpensive baker's couche and a lame (bread-scoring blade). Even so, the tools were sitting in my living room for months...

What finally brought me back to baking bread was... onion soup. The kind that has a nice slice of old baguette floating just under the melted, bubbling Gruyère cheese. I went to get a simple baguette at my local BJ's and they wanted... $4.00... for a loaf that wasn't even the usual BJ's super-size... For something that simple and basic, the price seemed excessive.

I didn't start with baguettes, though. I started back because my store cut back my work hours to barely a few hours a week, and I needed bread in the house. I had the time, I had the ingredients, and I had the know-how.

My first week, I made King Arthur Baking's Irish Soda Bread recipe — which is very different from the stuff sold in stores every March — along with a tried-and-true challah recipe, and a King Arthur recipe for Raisin-Pecan Rye Bread, That's a lot of bread for a three-person household, but my thinking went like this: the quick bread (soda bread) so we could have something right away, the challah would use up old eggs and be ready by dinner, and the raisin-pecan bread was something I expected the whole household to enjoy. 

I skipped the soda bread the second week, just making the challah and the raisin-pecan bread. The latter uses a pre-ferment called a biga, which is a traditional Italian method. It also uses the newer methods of less kneading and a longer proofing (fermenting, doubling, rise) time than the bread recipes of a generation (or two) ago. I was confused by the way the biga and dough felt, and wanted to get a better handle on it. (I need to try it one more time, in a future week, before permanently changing the recipe.) Meanwhile, I started resurrecting the rye sourdough starter I'd dried for storage a couple of years ago; it takes about a week to bring such a starter from flakes to usable starter.

One of the breads I wanted to try making again was a deli-style rye bread, but that was going to take a lot more planning. Deli rye has two components that make it a two- or three-day process: a rye sourdough pre-ferment and an altus, or soaker of old rye bread and water. (I have no idea what the altus does offhand, only that it's part of the recipe.) That was the third week's bread bake. While the size and taste were familiar, the bread itself was much denser than it should have been 

Meanwhile, part of the process of keeping a sourdough culture alive is feeding it and using it on a regular basis. Once you have the mass of sourdough you want to maintain, you discard half of it and feed the remaining half with more flour and water. Rather than throwing it out, King Arthur has a number of recipes that use "unfed" or "discard" sourdough. We've glommed onto the Buttery Sourdough Biscuits recipe. The nice thing about this recipe is that it only makes about a half-dozen biscuits, which is just enough for breakfast without leaving anything to get cold. In the past month I've made it with rye starter, and with all-purpose (white) flour starter, with rye flour, with white whole wheat flour, and with all-purposes flour. Each has a distinct rise, taste, and texture. It's a keeper.