How I Learned to Not Burn My Roast
I like to eat. Quite a bit, actually. Whenever Pattie and I talk about taking a trip, one of the top items on the agenda is, “Where are we going to eat?” Going to restaurants has always been one of our preferred forms of recreation. As much as I like food, though, for a long time I wasn’t particularly comfortable in the kitchen; I knew how to make a few basic meals, and that was pretty much it. I didn’t have a whole lot of variety, and I didn’t have the basic knowledge to vary the recipes I did know and have much confidence in the results. I mean, yeah, I could whip up some mean English muffin pizzas and pork roll-egg-and-cheese sandwiches, but man can not live on these alone. Not without significant cholesterol-lowering medication, anyway.
My limited knowledge was sufficient during my college years, and even during the one year I spent in New York after graduation. I didn’t have a lot of time or money to put into cookware or ingredients; in college I was sharing a fridge with five other guys and whichever of their girlfriends were living in the apartment at the time, and when I graduated I had a kitchen roughly the size of my desk with equipment that almost certainly posed a fire hazard to myself and neighboring counties. But once I moved back to Philly, into an apartment with a ridiculously nice kitchen for a rental apartment, I knew it was time for change. I had to learn to really cook.
Where to start was the question. I could try cooking shows; my father and I used to watch The Frugal Gourmet back before various allegations and revelations derailed Jeff Smith’s career, and he had even owned a couple of his cookbooks. (Said books motivated my dad to cut a flap out of a metal trash can in order to turn it into a smoker.) I had found them entertaining, and I learned a few things about food, but nothing I felt I could translate. The dishes Smith made seemed more complicated than what I was interested in, and I still felt like he was operating at a level beyond me. And he was probably one of the best of the hosts. Once we moved, I’d occasionally watch Emeril Lagasse’s show on the Food Network. Not only did I find that food unappetizing, when Lagasse wasn’t yelling “Bam” or kicking things up some number of notches, he wasn’t really saying much about what he was doing. If I did exactly what he did, and I was lucky, I might have the exact dish he made, which I already knew I didn’t want.
Cookbooks also didn’t seem like a viable option at first, because the only cookbooks I had ever encountered were basically collections of recipes, often with pictures. Following instructions by rote was fine, and I learned a few specific dishes that way. But any good Deweyan will tell you that rote learning is far from effective. I wanted someone to help tell me why I was doing what I was doing, so I could apply the knowledge to different situations in the future. That’s when Pattie introduced me to The Joy of Cooking, which I now realize only makes me about 70 years late to the party. The book has an extensive selection of recipes, but more importantly, each chapter begins with basic introductory material that discusses the food in question – where it comes from, how it’s brought to market, what to look for in buying it, and how it responds to different cooking methods. Just as an example, I learned that roasting, say, beef eye round at a high temperature will create a crisper, brown crust that I find tasty, but can toughen the meat. Roasting at low temperatures will keep the meat tender, but sacrifice flavor. But roasting at high for 15-20 minutes, and then dialing the temperature way down for the rest of the cooking time, will achieve a very happy medium. Ah ha! Here was basic information that had a tangible result in yummier food! Progress was being made.
If The Joy of Cooking redeemed cookbooks, Alton Brown saved cooking shows. His Good Eats takes the same back to basics approach – there’s no metal-cutting required for his homemade smoker, which uses a plain old cardboard box. In the pilot episode, all Brown cooks in half an hour is one rib eye steak. But before that, he’s introduced us to Mel Coleman, the organic rancher who now supplies the Thomer-Gillett household with beef a-plenty; visited a butcher to see where steaks come from and how they should be selected; and scoured a hardware store to find a cast iron pan, a piece of cookware that has since become one of my best friends. He’s also covered the effect of salt on meat, explaining that it draws moisture and certain proteins toward the surface – where they’re available for crust formation – and stressed the merits of precision in cooking. Brown’s no “cooking is an art that must be done on instinct” snob. He figures cooking is the application of heat to food, and it’s a process that obeys the laws of physics. So with the right information, we should be able to take control of the process. Thus was I inspired to purchase a digital probe thermometer, which brought my roast beef one step closer to perfection. With a little kosher salt and pepper on the outside of the roast, I got a great crust; with the probe thermometer stuck dead center, I could cook that roast until it hit exactly the doneness I wanted. No more underdone or overdone roasts for me. (Brown prefers to do his 15-20 minutes of high heat at the end of the cooking, arguing that it preserves more juice that way. I’m never lacking for juice in my roast beef, so I tend not to worry about this as much.)
Brown opened my eyes to the world of food science, and it’s a world I’m still making my way through. Brown has written two books, I’m Just Here for the Food and Alton Brown’s Gear for Your Kitchen. The latter expands upon ground covered in the former, but I’m happy to have both on my bookshelf, even if I’ve tried very few of the actual recipes contained within. Again, the knowledge about the cooking process is far more valuable than any particular dish. Brown’s web site recommends CookWise by Shirley Corriher, a food scientist who frequently appears on Good Eats (along with nutritional anthropologists, dieticians, and cookie-explaining puppets – no, not that one!). I’m only one chapter into it so far, but what a chapter – a hundred pages just on bread, including types of flour, types of yeast, how the one reacts to the other, and much more. I don’t know when I’ll actually try and make a loaf from scratch – not when the Whole Foods Market bakery has such good stuff – but I still feel like I learned something useful from reading it. And when I’m done, I’m sure I’ll have a few more culinary tricks up my sleeve. Good thing too, because it looks like that liking-to-eat thing has been passed on to the next generation.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.