Much Applied

Most recipes can yield enough to feed a village. OK, that is a bit of an exaggeration, but still, if it is your first time making it and your village consists of just you and your better half, a bad result becomes an abusive diet to your loved one, or an abuse to the environment through huge waste. Even if it was a good result, the huge quantity lasts for days and you end up feeling sick of it.

A lot of recipes are probably passed down from many generations ago when a household commonly was as large as a village.

If it was a meat dish, you probably can freeze the leftovers. Freezing detracts from the quality of most food, not just the taste and nutrition, but especially the texture. Anyway, it is (loosely) viable. When it is Carbonara, you are eating it, the whole lot of it, that very meal! No matter how yummy it is, which it was, as I struck beginner's luck, there is a limit to the size of your stomach.

It is often difficult to scale a recipe and keep the recipe-intended quality at the same time.

The good news is that if you got all the basic skills down, and you have learned from wide enough range of recipes, you can spot the pattern and understand which basic building blocks are used in the recipe. Then, you can scale down the recipe by your experience. In the case of Carbonara, it is essentially the same concept as making custard with whole eggs, except the liquid is the pasta cooking water, it is savory instead of sweet, and cheese is added. 

Boy, it has been a long fattening road. But I am glad that the experiences are starting to pay off. I think, life is funny. No experience ever goes to waste, no matter how bad or useless they may seem at the time. They always serve us later, even if it is in small ways.

tip: 

Here is a general egg to liquid proportion reference for custard: http://www.incredibleegg.org/eggcyclopedia/c/custard/

I think the quarter cup to one egg ratio, with the cheese, gave a nice thick but not stiff sauce in Carbonara. However, as you don't want to drain the pasta for too long and allow it to lose too much heat, it will retain some cooking water. You may want to start with just 1 tablespoon of hot pasta water for each egg first and add more as needed.

Through the Barrier

Have you ever cooked with Chicken Tonight, jarred bolognese sauce, or whatever simmer sauce available on the market (forget the curry in my last post for a moment)? As they are generally referred to as simmer sauces, I thought the simmering process must be how the meat absorbs flavors from the sauce. It's not about letting the meat have a soak in the jacuzzi, right? How wrong I was! The taste stays in the sauce, which may even gain juice from the meat after a simmer and becomes tastier, but the meat usually ends up surprisingly bland.

But there was something else I observed in making other things that adds to this simmer sauce experience. I made stew quite a number of times before. Brown the meat first or not, throw everything in the pot, at the same time or may be not, wait a few hours, and voila! You have a stew, or perhaps, a casserool. Yes, yes, casserole. It is a lovely dish but purely in the sense of contrast, because everything tastes good, separately, cozying together in the same pot. But when I heated up the leftovers the next day, something happened. You might have seen it a lot of times before and never gave it a second thought. The potatoes looked darker, plainly having absorbed the liquid of the stew. So were the carrots etc., but it was most obvious with the potatoes as they previously were literally pale, in fact the palest of the lot. In terms of taste, they were beef, potatoes, carrots, etc in a stew before. Now, they were beef, potatoes, carrots, etc OF a stew.

So, it would seem that raw ingredients immersed in a flavoring liquid don't absorb flavors from the liquid during their first round of cooking. They may leach flavor into the liquid, though. Think soup.

Back to my butter chicken experiments, it only took the first try to reveal that recipe instructions for simmering previously browned meat are all about finishing off cooking the meat, be the recipe from a jar or otherwise. The 'failed' meat tells more, though. It was insipid besides being tough and shrunk, in spite of having been marinated before cooking. You know the saying "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." I tried again marinating the chicken with even more spices and herbs. And again, and again... Herbs and spices were flying in all directions and stuck to the ceiling and coating the windows. OK, that's an exaggeration, but you get the point. More herbs and spices did help more flavor to be retained after the simmer, but the chicken meat was still much less tasty compared to being cooked without the sauce.

I applied the new-found principle by stews in an attempt to preserve the flavor of the marinade. I cooked the marinated chicken pieces completely and cooled them prior to immersing them in the sauce. I then brought the lot back up to a simmer, and simmered just long enough to heat the whole dish through. The result was staggering. The chicken meat still lost most of the flavor!

The same was observed in marinated mince in a bolognese or other marinated meat cooked in a sauce. But then I pondered on the stew from a different angle. The ingredients started out having no flavoring, immersed in the flavorsome stock. Could it be a simple flavor diffusion thing?

Of course, it is. I marinaded the pieces of chicken meat as normal but intensely flavored the sauce. Voila! The meat hardly lost any flavor of the marinade after a simmer. It didn't even really matter whether I fully cooked or just browned the meat first.

So, there you go. I could not offer you any conclusion in my last post for finding a recipe to re-create the restaurant's butter chicken, because as the course of my experiments progressed, it changed my taste buds for curry. Not that there was no triumph, but triumph transcended the one-dimensional pursuit of a recipe. I guess, I gained the understanding of the truth about recipes. A recipe is an embodiment of individuality, mood, adaptation, and creativity. While there is no one best butter chicken recipe to me, I can offer the conclusion that there are two rules for making meats cooked in a sauce/liquid tasty, not just on the surface but on the inside too.

The Spice of Life

What do I know about spices and herbs? I know when I was a child, they all seemed to give some convoluted combination of tastes, rather than a simple sweet, salty or sour. So, herbs and spices, with spices more so than herbs, got relegated to the taste category that my juvenile taste buds could understand - bitter. I had no idea that they would one day become an important part of my journey to better myself in creating deliciousness.

Italian food is not just renowned for containing abundance of garlic and onion, but herbs too. Their recipes introduced me to a whole new world of taste through the use of herbs. Adding flat leaf parsley to your pasta, or simmering a meat sauce with oregano, for example, is simple enough, but it brings a dish to life. I would liken it to a vase of flowers or pot of plant to a living space.

As many challenges as there are still awaiting in the same type of food, we all need a change sometimes. Cooking tasty food was still a big deal and a huge quest for me, if you remember what motivated me to embark on this journey in the first place. Italian food is like my first love in this journey. But it was an inevitable eventuality - I had to move on to further my cause. It's not really goodbye. We will always have pasta.

Curry! Who could deny that an Indian curry is like an explosion of tastes and an epitome of utilizing spices and herbs too. My husband and I love this butter chicken dish from our most frequented little local Indian restaurant. Naturally, numerous experiments ensued in attempts to recreate the dish in my own kitchen.

At the beginning of the pursuit, the more recipes I read the more I was convinced that this one recipe titled "best butter chicken" must be it. Its ingredients list contained quite a number of different spices, and most importantly it listed butter, lots of it! Well, it is butter chicken after all.

Marinating the meat, coating them in all the spices, tomato paste and yogurt alone looked delicious. It looked promising. When I fried the spice paste and sautéed the onion and chicken, the fragrance was powerful, exciting, and reassuring. Cream was called for, thus allaying any doubt of a creamy result. But by the time the sauce was made up, before the chicken had a simmer, a little sampling suggested that this butter chicken ship might have sailed off course.

The produced dish had a magnificent complex taste, distinctly of a lot of spices, and bore absolutely no resemblance to the restaurant dish we love. The restaurant dish had a much more subtle taste in spices but was much thicker, more velvety and simply delicious.

The recipe said to stir in extra butter at the end. Perhaps, it needed more butter to give the thickness and smoothness of the restaurant version, so I thought to myself. I stirred in more butter, and tasted, and stirred in more butter, and tasted... I must have added 3 times the recipe's amount of saturated fat to the dish, to no avail. I gave up. We had a bowl of overloaded spicy heart-attack, with tight shrunk chunks of insipid chicken swimming in the watery cream solution. I still relive the jumble of disappointment, bewilderment, remorse and contentment whenever the memory of that fateful night resurfaces. Remorse - because of feeding my husband the unhealthy horrible food. Contentment - because I have such a wonderfully supportive husband who would eat the inedible horror just because I cooked it.

I guess we are particularly affected by criticism in our everyday life. It is a basic mechanism we humans have developed for survival - avoid pain or danger. But how high is the bar we subconsciously set for ourselves as a result, just to prove ourselves? I think my choice of recipe might have been substantially influenced by the need for overtly impressive taste. Hopefully, my husband didn't think it was some kind of punishment.

At the end of the day, a recipe is simply a means to consistently reproducing a dish for a specific palate. The number of different recipes from the different regional Indian cuisines that exist for the same dish, is sufficient testimony. Perhaps, one day our palate will grow up some more to enjoy vast convoluted mix of spices in abundance.

Wow, I can't believe it's been months since I last wrote. My apologies. I should be more committed to writing as I am to cooking.

Something I meant to say last time was that milk infused with bay leaf really makes a superior tasting white sauce, or béchamel sauce. While the slice of onion also makes the final product tasty, which could be replaced by garlic or shallot, the bay leaf is indispensable. It not only gives complexity to the sauce, but takes away the raw milkiness of milk. If you have sensitive taste buds about milk like I do, you would know what I mean.

Nutmeg, too, gives complexity to the taste. Mmm...the world of herbs and spices awaits. So much to learn!

This is a short post, I know. But I'll be back! (Can anyone say that without hearing Arnold Schwarzenegger's voice? Hahaha)