What are you doing in that recipe, and why are you doing it?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When following a cookbook recipe, you may get stuck in a rut and just put your brain on hold. My wife and I enjoy watching the America’s Test Kitchen TV show. A couple years ago I bought her a 982-page 2017 hardcover book -  The Complete America’s Test Kitchen TV Show Cookbook. I’ve been reading it, and noticed some questionable things.  

 

Let’s look at shrimp. My first example is shrimp burgers, on page 572. Their recipe also appeared in an article on July 29, 2019 at the Associated Press titled How to make a moist, chunky shrimp burger without the mush. It calls for 1-1/2 pounds of extra-large shrimp (21 to 25 per pound), peeled, deveined, and patted dry. Then those shrimp are pulsed to chop them in a food processor. Why did they need to be the more expensive extra-large variety? Wouldn’t large or medium shrimp have worked just as well? There also is a YouTube video titled How to make crispy shrimp burgers. It does instead call for large shrimp (26 to 30 per pound). My second example is a recipe on pages 454 and 455 for Indonesian-Style Fried Rice which also is at their web site. It also calls for extra-large shrimp but then cuts them crosswise into thirds. Again, large shrimp cut in half would work (or whole medium shrimp).

 

Pages 632 and 633 of the cookbook have a recipe for poached eggs. Under WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS it claims:

 

“A touch of vinegar lowered the boiling point of the water so that we were able to cook the eggs over more gentle heat.”

 

But the actual recipe has you put the eggs into the pan of boiling water and then immediately remove the pan from the heat. Therefore the boiling point is irrelevant. An article by Robert Keyzers at the Victoria University of Wellington on November 28, 2019 titled Why do we add vinegar when we are poaching an egg? explains instead that vinegar makes the water more acidic and thus helps coagulate the egg white. Another article at The Splendid Table on April 5, 2017 titled Perfect poached eggs with America’s Test Kitchen agrees. It says that:

 

“We also tried vinegar, which is something that people have been doing for generations. The reason why it actually makes sense : it lowers the pH of the water, causing the egg whites to set at a lower temperature.”     

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a several decades-old story about blindly following a recipe from your grandmother for making a pot roast. She had called for cutting off both ends (shown above), so your mother also did that, and then so did you. An article at Snopes on November 9, 1999 titled Grandma’s cooking secret explains what went on. Grandma had to cut the ends off because she didn’t have a big enough pot to hold the original length of meat. A similar tale is told by Tom Jupile at the Chromatography Forum on November 21, 2005 in an article titled The original “grandma’s ham” story. Back on December 23, 2012 I blogged about Learning from two kinds of articles or books: recipes or mindless rules versus methods or ratios.

 

The image of a shrimp burger (from KFC in Vietnam back in 2007) came via Kham Tran at Wikimedia Commons.