The good news is I beat my best time for swimming a mile by over 1½ minutes – a huge improvement. The bad news is I am Samson shorn of his hair. In a word, knackered. So here’s something gentle and speculative: cooking as chemistry.
By which I mean combining flavoured constituents to create a new flavour and, ideally, an end-product in which the constituents are no longer visibly evident. A cake is a perfect example (reflect on how unpleasant it would be to eat the constituents individually) whereas a stew falls short. Application of heat is probably assumed.
But perhaps such fusion becomes more magical when it involves the smallest number of ingredients. Hollandaise sauce consists only of butter and egg yoke plus a dash of lemon juice or vinegar. Just as vital are patience and slow heating. Yet I see this as being closer to the biogenetics lab than the kitchen. Diverge from the rules and the sauce is not spoiled, it becomes something else: a bastard form of scrambled egg.
From my limited experience, making hollandaise is Three Toques (Raymond Blanc’s grading of culinary severity) and I never aspired to that. I have made soup – and blogged about it – and it met the above premises. I also discovered, off my own bat, that an ingredient too far precludes fusion. Add Lea & Perrins and the rest of the soup simply becomes a background for that very opinionated product.
Question: bacon and eggs are made for each other yet – assuming they are eaten together – do they fuse? There’s a new texture but is there a new flavour?
By which I mean combining flavoured constituents to create a new flavour and, ideally, an end-product in which the constituents are no longer visibly evident. A cake is a perfect example (reflect on how unpleasant it would be to eat the constituents individually) whereas a stew falls short. Application of heat is probably assumed.
But perhaps such fusion becomes more magical when it involves the smallest number of ingredients. Hollandaise sauce consists only of butter and egg yoke plus a dash of lemon juice or vinegar. Just as vital are patience and slow heating. Yet I see this as being closer to the biogenetics lab than the kitchen. Diverge from the rules and the sauce is not spoiled, it becomes something else: a bastard form of scrambled egg.
From my limited experience, making hollandaise is Three Toques (Raymond Blanc’s grading of culinary severity) and I never aspired to that. I have made soup – and blogged about it – and it met the above premises. I also discovered, off my own bat, that an ingredient too far precludes fusion. Add Lea & Perrins and the rest of the soup simply becomes a background for that very opinionated product.
Question: bacon and eggs are made for each other yet – assuming they are eaten together – do they fuse? There’s a new texture but is there a new flavour?
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