Status Updates From Cooked: A Natural History o...

The microbes needed for bread fermentation are probably everywhere, but their growth is dependent on the baker controlling the environment: food & feeding schedule, ambient temperature, amount of water.
Frequent feedings & warm temperatures favor the yeasts, creating an airy milder loaf; less feedings & refrigeration favors the bacteria, leading to a more acidic environment, and more strongly flavored bread.

Bread fermentation depends on a symbiotic relationship between a yeast (Candida milleri) and a bacteria (Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis). Each microbe consumes a different type of sugar, so they don’t compete for food. When the yeasts die their proteins break down into amino acids needed by the bacteria. L.s also produces acids that C.m. is fine with but that discourage other yeasts & bacteria.

On microwaving food:
“Is there any more futile, soul irradiating experience than standing before the little window on a microwave oven watching the carousel slowly revolve your frozen block of dinner? Time spent this way might be easier than cooking, but it is not enjoyable and surely not ennobling. It is to feel spiritually unemployed, useless to self and humanity.”

“Once I committed a couple of hours to being in the kitchen, I found my usual impatience fade & could give myself over to the afternoon’s unhurried project…There’s something about such work that seems to alter the experience of time, helps me to reoccupy the present tense. ‘When chopping onions, JUST chop onions.’ One of the great luxuries of life at this point is to be able to do ONE thing at a time.”

Time (slow cooking) is an essential ingredient in braises. When you first cook meat (a muscle), it tenses up (tight/tough), but after more time it “relaxes”.
Start a braise in the oven at 200 with the lid off, for 2 hours. This brings the liquid to ~ 120 which allows enzymes to break down connective tissues. Then cover the pot and increase temp to 250, until the meat reaches 180 (3-4 hrs): collagen melts=tender!

Umami Foods:
Tomatoes
Dried mushrooms
Parmesan
Cured anchovies
Meat stocks
Bacon
Soy sauce & miso
Dashi broth (kombu kelp + dried bonito fish)
* breast milk! (amino acids are cellular fuel & molecular building blocks of special value to growing stomach & intestinal tissues)

Umami, like sweet & salty, is a taste we are innately drawn to, as it signals the presence of an essential nutrient (protein). Protein contains long chains of amino acid building blocks. The 3 mains of umami are glutamate, inosinate & guanylate, and they have a synergistic effect, amplifying each other when combined. They don’t taste like much on their own, but intensify (italicize) the savory ingredients in a dish

Why are onions such a classic staple foundation in pot cooking dishes? They are the 2nd most important vegetable crop (after tomatoes), grow almost anywhere (cheap & available) & add sweetness. They also contain powerful antimicrobial compounds that survive cooking, and may, along with spices, protect us from dangerous bacteria on meat. This may explain why these ingredients increase in proximity to the equator.

The microwave oven stands at the opposite end of the culinary (and imaginative) spectrum from the cook fire. Compared with the mesmerizing draw of a fire, the microwave exerts a kind of antigravity- it’s flameless, smokeless, antisensory cold heat giving us a mild case of the willies. The microwave is as antisocial as the cook fire is communal. Who ever gathers around the Panasonic Hearth?

“Animals need food, water & shelter… we humans need all those things, but we need fire too.” (Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire).
We are the only species that depends on fire to maintain our body heat, as well as to cook our food. By now the control of fire is folded into our genes, a matter of not just human culture but also our biology (The Cooking Hypothesis of human evolution).

Ritual sacrifice achieves 3 important purposes:
1. To regulate the potentially savage business of eating meat (encouraging self-control, regulating competition for cooked meat)
2. To bring people together in a community (sharing meat, cook fire draws people together & encourages cooperation/collaboration)
3. Support & elevate the priestly class in charge of it (actual priests or pitmasters- maintain the institution)

Nowadays we think of sacrifice as a primitive rite, but such cultures practicing them at least acknowledged that something important was happening in eating animals, something demanded their full attention. Just because we moderns pay less attention doesn’t mean something momentous hasn’t happened. In our failure to attend to the process involved in eating meat, you have to wonder who are the more primitive ones!

Animal sacrifice has been a way to make animal flesh “good to think” (not just ‘good to eat’)- to help people feel better about killing, cooking & eating animals, which has never been anything less than a spiritually freighted and deeply ambivalent occasion. Like fire itself all cooking begins with some act of destruction: killing, cutting, chopping, mashing. In that sense, a sacrifice is at its very heart.

To cook even a bit more than you already do, or perhaps try & make something you only ever expected to buy- will constitute a kind of vote. A vote against the disconnection of specialization, against the total rationalization of life, against the infiltration of corporate interests seeking to organize our every waking moment.
Cooking gives us the rare opportunity to work directly in our own support- & those we feed.

Cooking- of whatever kind, every day or extreme- situates us in the world in a very special place, facing the natural world on one side and the social world on the other. The cook stands squarely between nature and culture, conducting a process of translation and negotiation. Both nature and culture are transformed by the work; and in the process so is the cook.

Richard Wrangham’s “Cooking Hypothesis”: cooking was the key that facilitated human cultural evolution.
Cooking allows much of the work of chewing & digestion to be performed outside the body using outside sources of energy, feeding a larger brain &
freeing up time/energy for other activities (creating culture). Heat cooking also created a meal time (v. Solo grazing), which encouraged sharing & group sociality.

"it helps to be able to think like a grass seed and, at the same time, like the community of yeasts and bacteria living in your sourdough culture. control you can just forget about: there are too many interests and variables in play."
the "air" part always makes me feel so doomed about ever eating or baking truly nutritious bread but then Pollan brings it back fr