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.

Not-Corned Beef Burgers

 So, in the middle of all the COVID-19 confusion, my state political party decided to hold its annual picnic and general meeting on a Saturday. These are generally pot-luck/covered-dish sorts of events where the venue has grills to use and everyone brings something to eat with enough to share. 

With things a bit of a last-minute for me, and me never trusting anyone else's grill to be have never cooked dairy or pork (or animals that could not ever be kosher), I decided to save myself next-day cleanup mess by bringing along a chili that could top burgers or hot dogs, or be eaten by itself. Unusually for me, I decided on a beef-and-bean chili (I usually make my chilis pareve/vegan so that I can either top them with cheese or use them to top a burger or hot dog). So I picked up several pounds of ground beef and several pounds of dried beans, and set the beans to soak overnight Thursday. 

Technique note: I soak my beans for chili in water that includes onion powder, garlic powder, one or two whole dried chilis, and a few bay leaves. I cook my beans in water that contains similar seasonings. I believe this counteracts the beans' usual blandness.

When I got home from work Friday morning and checked my email, I found a message saying the picnic had been cancelled due to a power outage at the venue. While we had had heavy rains mid-week, it had never occurred to me that power would be an issue: I'm used to doing Field Day (an annual Ham Radio event) with portable generators that ran the radios and the lights, and gas- or charcoal-powered grills to cook our meals.

So, I made as little of the chili as I could to use up the beans, but I still had four pounds of hermetically-sealed extra-lean ground beef in the refrigerator, with no space to freeze it, and with a use-by date a week or two out.

Somewhere along the line I got the idea to see what would happen if I used corned-beef or pastrami seasoning on ground beef, and serve those burgers on rye buns. Researching recipes for corned beef and pastrami were a bit tricky, since most of them started out with already-brined brisket (the sort that is only inexpensive around Saint Patrick's Day) and pre-packaged, whole pickling spices.

After a bit of work, I found  few reasonable recipes for corned beef, and a few different options for pickling spice blends. Since putting whole spices into burgers is (obviously) Not A Good Idea, I had to convert the whole-spice measurements into weight substitutes so I could measure out ground spices to make my blend.

Please note there are a few issues with using ground spices instead of whole spices, and mixing spices into ground beef meant for the grill as opposed to brining a whole brisket for over a week and then simmering it with a fresh packet of pickling spice. These include:

• Whole spices release their flavor much more slowly than ground spices
• Salt and acid break down tough flesh and also help infuse spice flavor into the meat (this is why tougher cuts of meat are usually brined or marinated in a wine or vinegar mixture).
• Depending on whether your spices are freshly ground or have been hanging around a while, your ground spices can have a stronger or a weaker flavor than their whole progenitors.
• It's difficult to tell a priori how much flavor has infused into a brisket and how that relates to how much of a ground-spice blend to add to ground beef.

Needless to say, our crazy work schedules left me putting off and putting off using the ground beef until it was two days past its "use or freeze" date. So it was "now or never" for putting my blend together and trying it out.

I would have done a lot more fresh-grinding if one of my store-and-grind containers hadn't broken and my hands and arms weren't sore from various recent injuries; as a result, a lot of my mixture came from my very long-in-the-tooth ground-spice rack. That said, it required a bit of tasting along the way to decide how much salt I needed to add in, whether I really had enough mustard, and that ground bay leaf needs a slightly lighter hand, weight-wise, than its whole-leaf component (to avoid bitterness).

Please note that while I purchase a number of my harder-to-find and specific-origin spices from Savory Spice Shop, it is because their nearest retail store is convenient to me (about five miles from home) and has a great selection. Many similar seasonings can be found from brands such as Simply Organic at places like Whole Foods.

The proportions I ended up with were:

• 11.5 g ground coriander
• 8 g ground black pepper
• 14.5 g mustard powder
• 0.4 g Powdered Turkish Bay Leaves
• 3 g ground allspice
• 1.5 g garlic powder
• 6 g onion powder
• 10 g sea salt, freshly ground (I use La Baleine as my usual table salt; for a smokier taste I might have substituted something like Hickory Smoked Sea Salt or Alderwood Smoked Sea Salt
• 0.5 g White Wine Vinegar Powder (for acidity)
• 3 g Cook's Charcoal Seasoning (to enhance the "grilled" taste)

This resulted in approximately 1/2 c (8 tablespoons) of spice mix, about 2 oz (57.4 g).

Once I got the spice mixture together, the next thing I needed to figure out was how much to use for my no-time-to-sit-and-marinate ground beef. (I still believe the best method for this sort of seasoning would be to season the beef and let it sit in the refrigerator for a day or two before grilling. That sort of "soak" time would require a lot less spice than cooking the burgers immediately.) While most of my as-purchased seasoning mixes suggest using 1/4 teaspoon per pound of meat, I started with an amount of spice which, in whole form, was intended to season approximately four pounds of meat (the same amount I had). A teaspoon for the whole lot would have been gross underkill, but the entire half-cup of spice blend would have been way too much.

I settled on an initial trial of about 4.5 teaspoons for my ground beef. My sister found it overseasoned, while my Other Half thought it needed a bit more. I found it pleasant as it was, but definitely not tasting anywhere close to corned beef. Adding more spice helped, as did using some of the mixture as the basis for a spread which could be used on its own or as an adjunct to mustard.

Final proportions:

The next time I use this for immediate grilling, I'll use the proportions of about 6 t per 4 lb, or 1.5 t (1/2 T) per pound of beef.

I also made a nice bit of a spread by mixing 1/2 t spice mix with 1/2 t honey and about 1.5 T balsamic vinegar. I probably should have added a bit more honey, but it was a nice way to boost the flavor of the seasoning. I might try making up a cup of that mix as a wet marinade for a London Broil or a roast.

If I were going to season a day or two in advance of grilling, I'd probably start with about half of that and see from there.

Now I have another seasoning mix to work with. 

More "Fun With Food"!