Kitchen Mythbusters
What If Grandma Was Wrong?
Test Your Cooking IQ
Spot the Myth
Memorize This!
How to Use Your Refrigerator
Cheat Sheet
Equivalents and Conversions
Cooking knowledge and kitchen skills are often handed down from one generation to the next. But sometimes what gets passed down is more than a classic lasagna recipe or a secret trick for making pie dough; it’s traditional wisdom about ingredients and techniques that may or may not be accurate, as much as we hate to admit it. We’ll be the first to credit our parents and grandparents for our love of cooking and food, and maybe even our famous peach pie with the perfect crust, but they also taught us more than a few “facts” that turned out to be not exactly true. And over time, many of these inherited ideas have become widely held and largely unquestioned beliefs. In this chapter, we fact-check some of the most common and enduring pieces of kitchen mythology to see what’s really worth passing on and what needs to be debunked once and for all—sorry, Grandma and Grandpa.
Which of these common cooking “facts” are actually true and which are just myths?
1
Covering a pot will make the water boil faster.
2
Slamming the oven door or stomping your feet in the kitchen while a cake is baking will cause the cake to fall.
3
You can safely eat oysters only in months whose names contain the letter R.
4
You should never wash fresh mushrooms.
5
The thin white lines on the skin of a chile pepper indicate how spicy the pepper will be.
6
Adding oil to pasta cooking water will keep the pasta from sticking.
7
Cocktails taste better the longer they’re stirred.
8
Searing meat over high heat is the best way to seal in the meat’s juices.
9
You can regrow scallions by putting the roots in a glass of water, even if you’ve used up the green parts.
10
When you cook with wine, liquor, or beer, all the alcohol evaporates and burns off.
Answers
Searing meat at the start of cooking seals in the juices.
As far as we can tell, searing has no effect on how much moisture meat retains during cooking.
Cooking a steak usually occurs in two stages: a quick sear in a hot skillet to brown the surface, followed by gentler cooking to finish. Many people believe that searing the raw steak “seals in” the moisture in the meat, resulting in a juicier finished product than meat browned at the end of cooking. Yet we’ve all seen that well-seared steaks exude juices as they rest. So is this just a kitchen myth?
We weighed eight rib-eye steaks and divided them into two batches. We seared the first batch in a skillet over high heat, then cooked them in a 250-degree oven until they reached an internal temperature of 125 degrees. For the second batch we reversed the order, first placing the steaks in a 250-degree oven until they reached approximately 110 degrees, then searing them until their interiors hit 125 degrees. We weighed the steaks after cooking and averaged the results, then compared that with the average weight of the steaks before cooking. Both batches of steaks lost nearly an identical amount of liquid: around 22 percent of their weight. If searing truly seals in juices, the steaks seared first would have had more moisture trapped inside than those seared after cooking in the oven.
One thing that does make a difference in how juicy meat will be is resting it after cooking. Resting allows the juices, which are driven to the center of the meat during cooking, to redistribute themselves more evenly. As a result, meat that has rested sheds less juice than meat sliced straight from the grill, skillet, or oven. For more information, see here.
Cutting into meat while it’s cooking to check its doneness will cause it to lose its juices.
This is an acceptable method for some cuts of meat but should be avoided with others.
For precision, and also to prevent moisture loss, it’s better to use a thermometer to check doneness. When cooking a particularly thin piece of meat, however, it’s difficult to use a thermometer, so our recommended alternative is the “nick-and-peek” method of making a small cut into the meat with a paring knife to check doneness. However, widespread belief holds that cutting into meat while it’s cooking should be avoided since it allegedly allows precious juices to escape.
To put this theory to the test, we prepared two samples each of 1¼-inch-thick pan-fried strip steaks (cooked to medium-rare, or 130 degrees), pan-seared oven-roasted pork tenderloins (cooked to medium, or 140 degrees), and pan-roasted chicken breasts (cooked until well-done, or 160 degrees). We used both methods—thermometer and paring knife—to test for doneness and measured the amount of liquid expelled after each sample had rested for about 10 minutes. Both strip steaks exuded equal amounts of liquid (2 teaspoons), while the pork tenderloin checked using the nick-and-peek method lost ¼ teaspoon more juice, and the nicked chicken breast lost ¾ teaspoon more. Why the difference? Because the pork and the chicken were more fully cooked than the medium-rare steaks, it was necessary to make a relatively deep cut to determine doneness. In these cases, then, there is more moisture loss, so we recommend the thermometer method. Save nicking and peeking for fish and thin cuts of meat where a shallow slash will work just fine.
You should always fully thaw steaks before you start cooking them.
Actually, you can cook a great steak straight from the freezer.
We cut a strip loin into eight steaks, cut each steak in half crosswise, put the pieces in vacuum-sealed bags, and froze them. We then thawed half of each steak in the refrigerator overnight and kept the other half frozen. We seared both sets of steaks in a hot skillet and then transferred them to a low oven until they reached medium-rare (125 degrees). Not surprisingly, the frozen steaks took longer to finish cooking through in the oven. What was surprising, though, was that the frozen steaks actually browned in the skillet just as well as, and in the same amount of time as, the thawed steaks. Furthermore, they had less moisture loss and thinner bands of gray, overcooked meat directly under the crust than the thawed steaks. Tasters unanimously preferred the cooked-from-frozen steaks.
A fully frozen steak is extremely cold, which prevents overcooking while the surface reaches the very high temperatures necessary for browning reactions. As its slightly thicker gray band indicated, the steak that had been thawed had more overcooking around the edge, so it made sense that it also had greater moisture loss.
While we prefer to start with steak that’s never been frozen for the best texture, if we do have frozen steaks on hand, from now on we’ll cook them straight from the freezer. Freeze steaks, uncovered, overnight on a baking sheet (this dries them out to prevent excess splattering during cooking), then wrap them tightly in plastic wrap, place in a zipper-lock bag, and return to the freezer. To ensure that frozen steaks brown evenly, cook them in a large skillet with ⅛ inch of oil.
You can tell the doneness of a piece of meat by comparing its texture to the texture of your hand.
Sure, Fingerspitzengefühl (literally, “feeling in the tips of the fingers”) is one way to determine doneness, but you’ll get better results with a thermometer.
When meat is heated, the proteins inside the meat compress and contract, squeezing out some of the liquid trapped in the proteins, which then moves into the spaces created between the shrinking proteins. This process of muscle contraction explains why experienced chefs can determine the doneness of meat by pushing on it and judging the amount of resistance. The firmer the meat, the more shrinkage has occurred and thus the more cooked the meat is.
To help inexperienced grill cooks develop instinctive fingertip precision, chefs train them literally by hand: Different points on a relaxed, open palm replicate the texture of rare, medium-rare, and well-done meats. However, while professional cooks might rely on these “rules of thumb” to determine doneness, we find this method much too imprecise. An instant-read thermometer coupled with knowledge of how temperatures relate to desired doneness is a much more reliable path to success.
Rare |
Medium-Rare |
Well-Done |
If ground meat turns brown in the package, it has gone bad.
Fortunately, color changes of this nature are purely cosmetic—they have no bearing on the meat’s flavor or wholesomeness.
Ever find that the ground meat you just brought home from the supermarket is red on the outside but dark purple or brown on the inside? If you feared that this is an indication that the meat is past its prime or that something bad has happened to it, worry no more. The color in meat comes from a muscle protein called myoglobin. When the meat is freshly cut, this protein is deep purple. As the meat sits in its packaging (or in the butcher’s display case), the myoglobin converts to bright red oxymyoglobin on the meat’s exterior, where it is exposed to more oxygen. Inside the meat, where less oxygen can penetrate, it will slowly convert to brown metmyoglobin, creating the color difference between the surface of the meat and the interior, but not affecting the freshness or flavor of the meat.
Pink poultry and pork are always unsafe to eat.
Don’t overcook these meats because you’re afraid of a little pink.
In general, the red or pink color in meat comes from myoglobin in the muscle cells that store oxygen. Because the areas of the animal that tend to get the most exercise—the legs and thighs—require more oxygen, they contain more myoglobin, which makes them darker in color than the breasts. As turkey (or chicken) roasts in the oven, the oxygen attached to the myoglobin is released, and the meat becomes lighter and browner in color. However, trace amounts of other gases formed in a hot oven or grill may react with the myoglobin to produce a pink color, even if the poultry is fully cooked. Always rely on an instant-read thermometer to accurately ascertain doneness when roasting poultry.
As for pork, selective breeding has made today’s pork much leaner than pork in the past, and if you cook it till all traces of pinkness are gone, the meat will be dry and tough. We think that the leanest cuts are best cooked to 145 degrees. At this point, the meat will still have a tinge of pink in the center.
However, pink pork isn’t completely without risk. All meat may be subject to cross-contamination with pathogens such as salmonella. This can happen during processing, at the supermarket, or in your home. To reduce risk, food safety experts recommend cooking all meat to 160 degrees (well-done). But if you think it’s worth taking a small risk to enjoy a rosy steak, you might as well do the same with pork.
Chicken is done when the juices run clear.
It’s true that the juices will change color during cooking, but this is an inaccurate way to gauge doneness.
One persistent cooking belief is that if you poke chicken with a fork and the juices that come out are clear rather than pink, the meat is done. But is this oft-cited “rule” actually true? A chicken breast is done when it reaches 160 degrees, while thighs are done at 175 degrees. But when we cooked whole chickens, in one case the juices ran clear when the breast registered 145 degrees and the thigh 155 degrees—long before the chicken was done. And when we pierced another chicken that we’d overcooked (the breast registered 170 degrees and the thigh 180 degrees), it still oozed pink juices.
Here’s the scoop: The juices in a chicken are mostly water; they get their color from myoglobin. When myoglobin is heated, it loses its color. So there’s some good reasoning behind this idea. The problem is that the exact temperature at which this color change occurs varies depending on a number of factors (primarily the conditions under which the chicken was raised and processed). The best way to check for doneness? Use a thermometer, and make sure that both the light meat and dark meat are at the proper temperature before removing the chicken from the heat. For more information on how to use a thermometer to check the doneness of poultry, see here.
Poultry should be rinsed before cooking.
Rinsing poultry might actually cause more problems than it solves.
Both the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration advise against washing poultry. According to their research, while rinsing may remove some bacteria, the only way to ensure that all bacteria are killed is through proper cooking. Moreover, splashing bacteria around in the sink can be dangerous, especially if contaminated water lands on other kitchen surfaces—or on food that is ready to be served.
Some people argue that chicken should be rinsed for reasons of flavor, not safety. After sitting in its own blood and juices for days, they say, chicken should be unwrapped and refreshed under running water. To find out if rinsing had any impact on flavor, we roasted four chickens—two rinsed, two unrinsed—and held a blind tasting. Tasters couldn’t tell the difference. Our conclusion? Avoid rinsing raw meat and poultry. Rinsing is more likely to spread contaminants around the kitchen than to send them down the drain.
You should eat oysters only in months whose names contain the letter R.
There was a good reason for this rule once upon a time, but it doesn’t apply to modern oysters, so skip the superstition.
The “R” rule may have been true 30 or 40 years ago, but thanks to advances in aquaculture and refrigeration, it has fallen by the wayside. In days gone by, fishermen dug for oysters only in the colder “R” months (September through April) to avoid the spawning season. Warm waters (above 60 degrees) encourage spawning, rendering oysters milky, bland, soft-textured, and small. Once the spawning season is complete, oysters are generally plumper and better-tasting, thus commanding a higher price tag.
Today, oysters are more likely to be farmed than found, with farmers having more control over the conditions in which the bivalves are grown, harvested, and stored. This means that oyster cultivators can “plant” oysters in cold waters, thereby staggering spawning and keeping their product available year-round. So forget the “R” rule—any time is fine for eating oysters.
The best way to test a loaf of bread for doneness is by tapping on it to see if it sounds hollow.
There are much more accurate ways to ensure that your bread is fully baked.
Long before cooks had handy tools such as instant-read thermometers to aid in determining doneness, tapping the bottom of a loaf of bread was one of the only ways to assess its readiness for the cutting board. Still, the technique requires a practiced ear, and not everybody embraces its utility. (The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, for instance, warns that bread “often” sounds hollow—even when it’s not done.)
We baked our multigrain and American sandwich breads and then tapped the bottom crusts with our fingertips when they were below, at, and above their target temperatures. Some of our testers had no trouble recognizing the hollow sound of a fully cooked loaf, but to others, a tap on an underdone loaf sounded virtually the same. With practice, a baker might become adept at detecting when a tap sounds hollow, but we have found that it is much more effective to combine visual signs (the bread is properly browned) with the use of an instant-read thermometer. Rustic breads should be baked to an internal temperature of 200 to 210 degrees, while richer breads like brioche are done at 190 to 195 degrees. Make sure both the visual cues and the temperature match the doneness requirements for the specific recipe you’re baking.
When you’re making bread, use hot water to jump-start the yeast.
Do this only if you’re feeling particularly murderous toward the yeast…and your chances of a good rise in your dough.
Since heat activates yeast, some bakers—and indeed, some yeast manufacturers—advise using 120- to 130-degree water for making bread doughs. According to the manufacturers, this will “guarantee yeast activity.” However, those temperatures are dangerously close to the range at which yeast dies: 130 to 140 degrees. We suspect that the true intent is to guarantee yeast activity that is both rapid and visible. We know that yeast is perfectly active when combined with water at far colder temperatures (we use ice water when proofing doughs for several days to develop flavor)—the yeast just “wakes up” very slowly. Using hotter water would appeal to bakers for whom seeing dough bubble and rise (and seeing this happen quickly) is believing.
We advise patience, not only because hot water can kill the yeast, which means that your dough won’t rise at all, but also because at the very least it can negatively affect the structure and flavor of the finished bread by encouraging overproofing or overheating during mixing. Both result in overactive yeast, which creates sour flavors and loss of dough structure (less rise) through overproduction of acids and carbon dioxide.
In other words, there are no real advantages to using water that’s above 120 degrees in yeasted doughs—but there is a real risk of ruining them.
If you’re baking only half a batch of cupcakes or muffins, you should fill the remaining cups with water.
Don’t worry: Your baked goods (and your muffin tin) should be just fine without this messy extra step.
Proponents of this practice contend that filling any empty cups in a muffin tin with water serves two functions: preventing the tin from warping and also acting as a “heat sink” to ensure that muffins next to empty cups heat evenly (avoiding stunted growth or spotty browning).
We tested this theory by baking one batch of muffins in which all 12 of the muffin tin cups were completely filled with batter, one batch in which only six cups were filled with batter and the remaining six with water, and one batch in which six cups were filled with batter and the other six left empty. The results? All muffins had the same height, texture, and color, and none of the tins warped.
On reflection, the results make sense: In a full 12-cup muffin tin, all but the two center muffins are directly exposed to the oven’s heat on at least one side to no ill effect. Furthermore, if your muffin tin warps, that’s a sign that you need to find a better-quality tin.
Slamming the oven door (or walking too violently around the kitchen) will cause a cake to collapse.
As long as you don’t have elephants wandering around your kitchen, you should be OK!
Cakes rise as tiny air bubbles in the batter expand in the heat of the oven. To find out if slamming the door would interrupt the process enough to spell disaster, we mixed batters for muffins, yellow cake, angel food cake, and cheese soufflé and loaded them into hot ovens. Just before each item reached its maximum height, we opened the oven door all the way and gave it a hard slam.
The sturdy muffins emerged unharmed, as did the yellow cake. Even the notoriously fragile angel food cake and the soufflé survived the vigorous slamming. Why? A properly developed foam—whether powered by baking soda, baking powder, or beaten egg whites—is pretty resilient. While very rough handling (dropping a half-baked cake, for example) can make it collapse, there’s no need to worry about slamming doors or stomping around the kitchen.
In case you were wondering, the same is true for rotating cakes during baking. We made two each of the most delicate cakes we could think of: fluffy yellow layer cake and angel food cake, both containing whipped egg whites. One set of cakes we rotated at the halfway point, jostling them clumsily in order to drive the point home. The other we left alone. The result? Neither of the rotated cakes was worse for wear, and both were more evenly browned than the undisturbed cakes. It seems that even delicate cakes are fully set early on during baking, so there’s little risk of collapse halfway through—and rotating your baked goods will only improve the results.
Room-temperature eggs are best for cakes.
Sort of, but cold eggs are a problem only for specific recipes—and there’s an easy way to warm them up.
Cake recipes often call for room-temperature eggs, which incorporate into the batter more readily than cold eggs. We wondered, though, if the difference between room-temperature and cold eggs was so great that it could actually ruin a cake recipe. To find out, we conducted a blind tasting of two yellow cakes: one made with room-temperature eggs, the other with eggs pulled straight from the refrigerator. The cake prepared with cold eggs produced a slightly thicker batter and took five minutes longer to bake. The cake made with room-temperature eggs had a slightly finer, more even crumb, but the cold-egg cake was entirely acceptable. Overall, tasters strained to detect differences between the two cakes, so we think it’s fine to use cold eggs in most basic cake recipes.
However, cold eggs can cause problems in finicky cakes, such as angel food and chiffon, that rely on air incorporated into the beaten eggs as a primary means of leavening. In these cases, we found that cold eggs didn’t whip nearly as well as room-temperature eggs and that the cakes didn’t rise properly. As a result, these cakes were too dense when made with cold eggs. If you need to quickly warm whole eggs, place them in a bowl, cover them with hot—but not boiling—tap water, and let them sit for five minutes before using them.
Older eggs are better for baking than fresh eggs.
Don’t pass up farm-fresh eggs in hopes of baking a better cake—age doesn’t matter.
Because egg whites thin with age, some bakers theorize that the weakened proteins of eggs even a few weeks old can stretch more than those from just-laid eggs, leading to cakes that rise higher and have a softer, more tender texture than cakes made with the freshest eggs. To test this theory, we made a yellow layer cake with 7-week-old supermarket eggs (we determined their age by the date on the carton) and Vermont farm eggs laid a few days before. Any differences we found were slight. The cake made with older eggs dissolved a little more quickly on the tongue, and the cake made with farm-fresh eggs was a little more attractive. But only a few tasters actually detected these variations in texture. And did one cake rise higher than the other? No. So grab fresh eggs if you can. But think about scrambling or frying any you don’t use for baking, since those are dishes where freshness truly matters.
You can tell how fresh an egg is by putting it in a bowl of water—if it floats, it’s bad.
Older eggs do float, but that doesn’t tell you anything about their quality.
You may have heard this common advice for testing the freshness of eggs without cracking them open: Put the egg in a bowl of cold tap water. If it lies flat on the bottom, it’s fresh; if it stands up and bobs on the bottom, it’s not as fresh, though still safe to eat; if it floats to the surface, it’s bad. We decided to test this out with three cartons of eggs with sequential expiration dates exactly one month apart. Our results matched the description of the eggs’ behavior based on their age: Most of the eggs from the freshest carton sank, most of those from the next-freshest carton bobbed, and all of those from the oldest carton floated.
Eggs take in air as they age, creating an air cell inside. An egg that floats has a good-size air cell, indicating that the egg is at least a month or two old. Based on other tests we’ve done on the shelf life of eggs, however, we know that an older egg is not necessarily a spoiled egg. We found minimal performance differences in fresh eggs and eggs that were up to three months old. If an egg smells odd or displays discoloration, however, then it’s definitely time to pitch it.
If you start with hot water instead of cold water, your water will boil faster.
Yes, it probably will, but there’s a good reason you might want to use cold water and wait the extra couple of minutes.
Waiting for a pot of water to boil for pasta can feel like an eternity. It seems logical that starting with water that is hot from the tap might speed up the process. To test this, we filled two identical pots with 4 quarts of tap water, one hot and one cold, and brought them to a boil, uncovered. The hot tap water took 13½ minutes to reach a boil, while the cold water took 15 minutes. We then added 1 tablespoon of salt and 1 pound of pasta to each pot. When the pasta was done, we drained and tasted it plain (no oil, no sauce). None of our tasters could tell the difference between the two batches of pasta.
However, before you turn on the hot tap, you might want to consider what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has to say about cooking with hot tap water. According to the EPA, water hot from the tap can contain much higher levels of lead than cold tap water. Even cold tap water should be run for a while to ensure that any lead deposits are flushed out of the system. All of a sudden that extra minute and a half doesn’t seem quite so long.
Water will boil faster if you cover the pot.
True—and that’s not the only reason you should use a cover.
When you heat water in an open pot, some of the energy that could be raising the temperature of the liquid escapes with the vapor. But as long as more energy is being added to the water than is being lost with the vapor, the temperature will continue to rise until the water boils. Covering the pot prevents water vapor from escaping, enabling the temperature to rise more quickly. How much more quickly? In our experience, not a lot. When we brought 4 quarts of water to a boil in identical covered and uncovered stainless-steel Dutch ovens, the covered pot boiled in just over 12 minutes and the uncovered pot boiled in about 13½ minutes. But why waste even a small amount of time when it’s so easy not to?
If, however, you’re heating water or another liquid for a recipe and you need an exact amount, you’ll want to keep the lid on from the beginning. By the time 1 quart of liquid comes to a boil, it can lose more than 2 tablespoons in volume through steam if left uncovered. This might not seem like much, but it’s enough to throw off a recipe for chocolate cake, make a pastry cream more like pasty cream, or turn the simplest boiled rice gummy. So the next time the recipe calls for boiling a precise amount of liquid, put a lid on it.
The best way to tell if pasta is fully cooked is to throw it against the wall to see if it sticks.
This is certainly the best way to make a mess; there are better ways to tell if pasta is cooked.
We prefer pasta cooked al dente, which is an Italian term meaning “to the tooth,” or fully cooked but still firm when bitten. The cooking directions on the pasta box are a good starting point to get an idea of how long the pasta will take to cook, but those times are usually too long and will result in mushy, overcooked pasta. Figuring out exactly when to stop cooking takes a little trial and error.
Throwing the cooked pasta at the wall won’t tell you anything about how done it is. Instead, take a piece of pasta out of the pot and taste it. Testing the pasta a few minutes ahead of the cooking time prescribed on the box is the most accurate way we’ve found to determine the doneness. For further information on how to cook perfect al dente pasta, see here.
You should add oil to your cooking water to keep the pasta from sticking together as it cooks.
Don’t waste your oil; this does nothing for the pasta.
Adding salt to your pasta cooking water is a must to season the pasta from the inside out, but you can definitely skip the oil. It will only coat the pasta when you drain it, and that prevents the sauce from adhering.
The best way to keep pasta from sticking is to use a large amount of water. We recommend 4 quarts of water to 1 pound of pasta. This means you should be cooking pasta in a 6- or 8-quart stockpot or Dutch oven. Stirring the pasta for a minute or two after you add it to the boiling water will also help keep it from sticking.
Adding salt to your cooking water dramatically increases the sodium level of the pasta.
Salting the cooking water does add to the sodium content of the pasta, but probably not as much as you think.
Adding salt to pasta cooking water ensures that the pasta will be flavorful. Throughout the years we’ve zeroed in on a preferred ratio of 1 tablespoon of table salt to 4 quarts of cooking water per pound of pasta for the best-seasoned pasta of any shape or size.
We were curious to find out exactly how much sodium actually makes it into the pasta, so we sent samples of six different shapes—spaghetti, linguine, penne, rigatoni, campanelle, and orzo—all cooked al dente, to an independent lab for analysis.
The results? Give or take a few milligrams of sodium, all the shapes absorbed about the same amount of salt: 1/16 teaspoon per 4-ounce serving, or a total of ¼ teaspoon per pound of pasta. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend less than 2,300 milligrams (1 teaspoon) daily for people under age 51 and less than 1,500 milligrams (¾ teaspoon) for those age 51 and older, so even if you’re watching your sodium intake, the amount that pasta absorbs is so small that it’s probably not an issue.
Salt your cooking water only after it has come to a boil, since salt increases the time it takes for the water to boil and can cause pitting in your pan.
These aren’t major concerns, but it also won’t hurt to add the salt later.
Culinary students are taught to add salt to a pan of heating water only after it has reached a boil. Two explanations are offered: (1) Salt increases the time it takes for the water to boil, and (2) salt can cause pitting (the formation of tiny white spots on the pan) unless added after the water has come to a boil.
Indeed, it’s a scientific fact that salt will increase the boiling point of water. The generally accepted formula says that 1½ tablespoons of salt in 1 quart of water will raise the boiling point by about 1 degree. But those proportions yield a supersalty solution that is almost never used in cooking.
In the test kitchen, we used the same burner and the same pot to bring 4 quarts of water with and without 1 tablespoon of salt to a boil, uncovered. Both came to a boil in the same amount of time.
We also did not witness an occurrence of pitting when we conducted our tests. In any case, cookware manufacturers say that pitting does not affect the performance, only the appearance, of cookware. However, the quick dissolution of the salt (as occurs in boiling water) does help reduce the risk of pitting.
Our recipes almost always direct the cook to add salt to water after it has come to a boil. However, if you tend to be an absentminded cook for whom salting at the outset is the best way to ensure that it gets done, then go ahead and do it. If pitting is a concern, simply stir the water until the salt dissolves.
Salt is optional in most recipes—you can just leave it out.
Salt does much more than just flavor food. Even if a recipe calls for only a pinch of salt, resist the temptation to omit it.
Even the small amount of salt included in most baking recipes makes an enormous difference. We tested yellow layer cakes made with and without salt and found serious flavor differences. Tasters found the salt-free cake overly sweet but also bland—they called it “mild,” “flat,” and “dull,” and could barely detect any vanilla flavor. The cake that included salt was also sweet, but the flavors of butter and vanilla were much more balanced and pronounced.
Salt doesn’t just enhance flavors in foods; it also helps mask less agreeable tastes like bitterness. By suppressing bitterness, salt allows more desirable flavors—including sweetness and spices—to come through. In bread baking, salt controls the activity of yeast, strengthens gluten, and accents the bread’s flavor; it should never be omitted. Adding even a small amount of salt to an egg dish keeps the proteins in the eggs from bonding to each other, thereby producing a weaker protein chain and more tender eggs.
Salt is also a crucial component of many recipes involving meat and vegetables. Salt helps improve the texture and flavor of nearly every kind of meat. When salt is applied to raw meat, juices inside the meat are drawn to the surface. The salt then dissolves in the exuded liquid, forming a brine that is eventually reabsorbed by the meat. This brine acts to change the structure of the muscle proteins, helping them hold on to more of their own natural juices. Vegetables like tomatoes, cucumbers, and eggplant can also benefit from being salted to draw out their moisture before they’re used in a recipe.
A common misconception is that the refrigerator is simply a box of cold air, and you don’t have to worry about how or where you store things inside it. We often think of our refrigerator as having a single temperature (“cold”), but every refrigerator actually has a whole set of microclimates, with warmer, cooler, and more humid zones. You can make this temperature variation work to your advantage by learning which types of food are best suited to each of the different zones.
A. Cold Zone Back, Top to Bottom
The area of the shelves at the back of the fridge (and the bottom of the door) are normally the coldest areas (around 33 degrees). Meat, dairy, and produce that is not prone to chilling injury should be stored here.
B. Moderate Zone Front, Top to Bottom
The areas at the front of the refrigerator, from the top to the bottom shelves, are generally moderate, with temperatures above 37 degrees. Put eggs, butter, and fruits and vegetables that are sensitive to chilling injury here.
C. Humid Zone Crisper Drawer
Crispers provide a humid environment that helps keep produce with a high water content from shriveling and rotting. However, if the humidity is too high, water can accumulate and hasten spoilage. You can regulate the humidity by adjusting the vents; the more cold air that is let in, the less humid the environment will be.
Thin asparagus spears are more tender than thick ones.
Actually, thicker spears have better texture, but certain sizes are better for different dishes.
Asparagus spears are the plant shoots of an underground crown that can produce for up to 20 years. The thickness of a spear has nothing to do with its age—that is, a thin spear will not mature into a thick spear. Rather, diameter is determined by two factors: the age of the entire plant (younger crowns produce more slender stalks) and its variety.
So, which size is preferable? We snapped off the woody bottoms of fat and skinny spears, steamed them, and tasted them side by side, both plain and tossed with olive oil and salt. Both types tasted equally sweet, nutty, and grassy. To our surprise, the thicker spears had the better texture (if only by a hair). The reason? The vegetable’s fiber is slightly more concentrated in thinner spears.
Since thick and thin spears are both good bets, choose the size that best suits your cooking method. Thicker stalks are better for broiling and roasting because they will stand up to the intense dry heat that would quickly shrivel skinnier spears. We also like thick spears for grilling since they are easier to manipulate. Quick-cooking thin spears are good candidates for steaming and stir-frying.
Adding a raw potato will help rescue a dish that’s too salty.
It won’t, but there are other ways you can correct an oversalted dish.
Adding potatoes to oversalted foods simply doesn’t help. Yes, the potatoes might absorb some of the salty liquid, but the remaining liquid will still be too salty. However, there is a way to help mitigate the effects if you went overboard on the salt: Add another ingredient from the opposite end of the flavor spectrum. Depending on the recipe, you can add an acid (such as vinegar, lemon or lime juice, or canned unsalted tomatoes) or a sweetener (such as sugar, honey, or maple syrup) to counteract the offending saltiness. Use your judgment to figure out which addition would best suit the dish in question.
This approach also works for food that is too sweet or too spicy/acidic. To balance sweetness, use an acid or seasonings like fresh herbs or cayenne pepper. For sweet dishes, try a bit of liqueur or espresso powder. If your dish is too spicy or acidic, counteract that with a fat (such as butter, cream, sour cream, cheese, or olive oil) or a sweetener. (For more information, see here.)
While these adjustments can help in mild cases, keep in mind that prevention is the best medicine: Whenever possible, season with a light hand during the cooking process, then adjust the seasoning just before serving.
Most of the heat in a chile pepper resides in the seeds.
While seeding a chile will lessen the fieriness a little bit, most of the heat comes from other sources.
Chiles get their heat—or “pungency,” as the experts like to say—from a group of chemical compounds called capsaicinoids, the best known of which is capsaicin. To figure out where most of these compounds reside, we donned rubber gloves and separated the outer green-colored flesh, the inner whitish pith, and the seeds from 40 jalapeños. We then sent the lot to our food lab. As it turned out, there were just 5 milligrams of capsaicin per kilogram of green jalapeño flesh (not enough to really make much impact on the human tongue), 73 milligrams per kilogram of seeds, and an impressive 512 milligrams per kilogram of pith.
The reason why the seeds registered more heat than the flesh is simply that they are embedded in the pith; they are essentially guilty—or hot—by reason of association. So from now on, when we want to control the fire in a dish, we’ll do it by means of the pith. The seeds will just be along for the ride.
On a related note, it’s a common misconception that you can tell how hot a pepper is from the white lines on the outside, which are known as “corking.” It turns out that corking is merely a genetic trait with no bearing whatsoever on chile heat.
You should never wash fresh mushrooms.
Washing mushrooms will not ruin them, as long as you do it right.
You’ve probably heard that you should never, ever wash fresh mushrooms under running water. The thinking goes that their spongy nature will allow them to soak up water, making them soft and slimy in the final dish. But when preparing a mushroom-heavy dish, the painstaking task of gingerly wiping every mushroom with a damp cloth—the method recommended by most experts—had us questioning just how valid this “rule” really is.
After testing both methods (a damp cloth versus a quick rinse in a colander under running water), we found no difference in the texture of the finished dishes. Our rule of thumb? Wash mushrooms right before cooking; if you let rinsed mushrooms sit around for longer than 10 or 15 minutes, the texture will indeed begin to suffer.
White button mushrooms taste better if they’re older.
Surprisingly, there might be some truth to this one—but there’s a fine line between aged to perfection and just plain past their prime.
Freshly harvested white button mushrooms have firm caps, stems, and gills that are free of dark spots. That said, some chefs advocate the use of slightly older, blemished mushrooms, claiming that they are more flavorful than pristine, ultrafresh specimens. To test this claim for ourselves, we sautéed two batches of mushrooms, one fresh from the supermarket and one showing signs of age after a week in the refrigerator. In a side-by-side comparison, the results surprised us. Tasters found that the older mushrooms had a deeper, earthier flavor and were substantially more “mushroomy” than the unblemished samples. This is likely because some moisture had evaporated, allowing the flavors to concentrate.
The takeaway: There’s no need to discard old mushrooms. In fact, their imperfections may even improve the flavor of your dish. Do not, however, use mushrooms that smell fermented or feel slimy.
It’s impossible to overcook mushrooms.
While many foods we cook require precise attention to internal temperature and cooking time, mushrooms are remarkably forgiving.
Cooks often lump mushrooms into the category of vegetables, though they’re actually a fungus. While mushrooms display characteristics of vegetables (high water content) as well as meat (savory flavor), they are unique in their ability to maintain a pleasant texture over a wide range of cooking times.
We cut ½-inch-thick planks of portobello mushroom, zucchini, and beef tenderloin and steamed them in a basket in a large Dutch oven for 40 minutes. At 5-minute intervals, we used a piece of equipment called a CT3 Texture Analyzer to determine how much force was required to “bite” into each piece of food.
After 5 minutes of steaming, the tenderloin, portobello, and zucchini required 186, 199, and 239 grams of force, respectively, to compress (or “bite”) 3 millimeters into the food. Tasters noted that all the samples were tender. Over the course of the next 35 minutes, the tenderloin steadily toughened, eventually turning a whopping 293 percent tougher, while the zucchini decreased in firmness 83 percent and turned mushy and structureless. The portobello, meanwhile, increased in firmness just 57 percent over the same period of time; after a full 40 minutes of cooking, tasters found the mushroom to still be properly tender.
The key to mushrooms’ resiliency lies in their cell walls, which are made of a polymer called chitin. Unlike the proteins in meat or the pectin in vegetables, chitin is very heat-stable. This unique structure allows us to sauté mushrooms for just a few minutes or roast them for the better part of an hour, all the while achieving well-browned, perfectly tender specimens.
You can speed-ripen green bananas by roasting them in their skins.
While this might make the skins of the bananas appear ripe, it doesn’t actually affect the ripeness of the fruit.
Strategies for speeding the ripening of bananas abound, but as we worked our way through over eight cases of fruit while developing a banana bread recipe, we found most of them to be ineffective. One theory, for example, holds that freezing or roasting underripe bananas in their skins will quickly render them sweet and soft enough for baking. While these methods do turn the bananas black—giving them the appearance of their supersweet, overripe brethren—they do little to encourage the necessary conversion of starch to sugar.
The best way to ripen bananas is to enclose them in a paper bag for a few days. Fruit produces ethylene gas, which hastens ripening; the bag traps the gas while still allowing some moisture to escape. Since fully ripe fruit emits the most ethylene, placing a ripe banana or other ripe fruit in the bag with the unripe fruit will speed the process by a day or two. (For more information, see here.)
The best way to tell if an avocado is ripe is to squeeze it.
Yes, this is a good way to determine ripeness, but it’s also a good way to mistake a bruised avocado for a ripe one.
Our favorite type of avocados is Hass—the variety with dark, pebbly skin that’s probably the default at your grocery store. We find them to be creamier and more flavorful than the large, smooth-skinned varieties. Testing for ripeness can be a little tricky, though; while avocados do get softer as they ripen, squeezing to determine ripeness is not always the best gauge. Not only can you bruise the fruit by squeezing it, but a previously bruised fruit can also be mistaken for a ripe one this way.
Our preferred method for identifying a ripe avocado is to try to flick the small stem off the fruit. If it comes off easily and you can see green underneath it, the avocado is ripe. If it does not come off or you see brown underneath, the avocado is not yet ripe, or it’s overripe and therefore unusable.
If you do end up with an unripe avocado, we recommend storing it in the fridge for a few days. It will ripen a little more slowly than on the counter, but the ripening will be more even—and once completely ripe, a refrigerated avocado will last longer (about five full days).
Blowing into a bag of salad greens will help them last longer.
Maybe—but that doesn’t mean you should do it.
This notion seemed pretty wacky to us (not to mention unsanitary), but in the interest of science, we divided fresh salad greens into two batches, placing both samples in zipper-lock bags and lightly inflating one of them with a few exhales before sealing. The salad leaves stored in the regular bag started to wilt after five days, while—much to our surprise—those that had received a few puffs lasted almost twice as long.
Here’s why: Fresh produce ripens and eventually decomposes by the process of respiration (the conversion of glucose into carbon dioxide and water). However, exposing produce to elevated levels of carbon dioxide can retard the process. Air contains only 0.03 percent carbon dioxide, human breath as much as 4 to 5 percent. A couple of breaths into a zipper-lock bag full of salad greens increased the concentration of carbon dioxide enough to decelerate the respiration process.
Despite its effectiveness, we don’t recommend this practice, since human breath can contain airborne pathogens. However, if you have a seltzer maker, you can use that as a sanitary source of carbon dioxide; simply add a few puffs of gas before you seal the bag of greens.
You can avoid crying while slicing onions by lighting a candle near your cutting board.
It seems weird, but this does in fact work.
We can’t tell you how many onions we’ve chopped over the years. Let’s just say a lot. As a result, we’ve shed more than a few tears. What causes cut onions to be so pesky? When an onion is cut, the cells that are damaged in the process release sulfuric compounds as well as various enzymes, notably one called sulfoxide lyase. Those compounds and enzymes are separate when the onion’s cell structure is intact; when the onion is cut, they activate and mix to form the real culprit behind crying, a volatile new compound called thiopropanal sulfoxide. When this evaporates in the air, it irritates the eyes, causing redness and tears.
Through the years we’ve collected dozens of ideas from readers, colleagues, magazines, and books, all aimed at reducing tears while cutting onions. We finally decided to put those ideas to the test. They ranged from the commonsensical (work underneath an exhaust fan) to the comical (whistle while you work or hold a toothpick in your teeth).
Overall, the methods that worked best were to introduce a flame near the cut onions or to protect our eyes by covering them with goggles or contact lenses. A flame, which can be produced by either a candle or a gas burner, changes the activity of the thiopropanal sulfoxide by completing its oxidization. Contact lenses and goggles form a physical barrier that the vapors cannot penetrate. So, if you really want to keep tears at bay when handling onions, light a candle—or put on some ski goggles, even if it does look a bit silly.
If you store cut scallions in a glass of water, they’ll grow back.
This is a real, magical ingredient resurrection that you can stage right in your kitchen.
To test this tale of zombie alliums, we trimmed three bunches of scallions to about 3 inches above the white bulbs and set each bunch in a glass with 2 inches of tap water. We placed the glasses on a sunny windowsill, changed the water daily, and watched for developments.
We were happily surprised to find that the scallion tops grew back quickly—about an inch per day. After a week, we cut off the new green tops and tasted them. They were pleasantly pungent and even more crisp and fresh-tasting than many store-bought scallions. Encouraged, we repeated the process with the same scallions; this time the tops grew half as fast, came back skinnier, and tasted a bit milder.
The nutrients stored in the scallion’s white bulb are sufficient to regrow the tops once or twice, but the plants eventually run out of fuel. If you use scallion greens more often than whites, though, this is a clever way to ensure that you’ll always have a supply on hand. One shopping note: Select scallions with roots longer than ½ inch, as they’ll grow faster.
Rinsing grapes before storing them makes them spoil more quickly.
It’s true—washing and storage can make a big difference in the freshness of this fruit.
We took bunches of red and white grapes and removed any on-the-verge or obviously rotten ones. Then we rinsed and dried half of each bunch, leaving the other half unrinsed. We also wondered whether leaving the fruit on the stem hastens or delays spoilage, so we plucked some of the grapes from their stems and left the remaining clusters intact. Then we refrigerated all the samples in the perforated bags that we bought them in.
All the rinsed grapes spoiled within just a couple of days. Why? Even though we had dried them as much as possible, moisture exposure encouraged bacterial growth. The unrinsed loose grapes were the next to rot, as the now-exposed stem attachment point became an entryway for bacteria. Unrinsed stem-on grapes fared best, lasting nearly two weeks before starting to decay. In fact, as long as we periodically inspected the bunches and removed any decaying grapes, most of them—both red and white samples—kept for an entire month. So don’t pull grapes from their stems before refrigeration. Simply discard any that show signs of rotting, and hold off on rinsing until just before you’re going to eat the fruit.
Eating pine nuts can affect your sense of taste.
If you’ve experienced this, you weren’t going crazy—there really is something going on.
A mysterious phenomenon sometimes occurs when people eat pine nuts on their own or in a dish such as pesto: Their sense of taste is temporarily altered, causing most food and drink (including water) to taste bitter or metallic. The nuts themselves taste fine; the condition emerges hours or even days after ingestion and can linger for as long as two weeks. Doctors have labeled this condition “pine mouth,” and while it is clearly linked to the consumption of pine nuts, its underlying explanation remains a mystery. One theory is that the reaction stems from rancid nuts. The most recent hypothesis suggests that new types of pine nuts introduced to the marketplace from China (now one of the largest—and cheapest—suppliers of the foodstuff) may be to blame. According to newspaper reports, Swiss researchers found at least two Chinese species for sale that had never previously been used for human consumption, which might explain the rising prevalence of pine mouth.
The good news? While the symptoms of pine mouth are downright unpleasant, the condition is temporary and does not seem to present any health concerns. But until the true source of pine mouth is understood, we recommend purchasing the more expensive Middle Eastern or European pine nuts and refrigerating or freezing them in a well-sealed container to stave off rancidity.
Cooking will completely evaporate any alcohol you add to a recipe.
Though it is possible to cook off the majority of alcohol in a recipe, traces will always remain.
It’s a commonly heard refrain: “Cooking removes all the alcohol.” But the truth is much more complex. When alcohol and water mix, they form a solution called an azeotrope—a mixture of two different liquids that behaves as if it were a single compound. Even though alcohol evaporates at a lower temperature than water, the vapors coming off an alcohol-water azeotrope contain both alcohol and water. Because alcohol binds with water during cooking, trace amounts remain in food as long as there’s still moisture.
We measured the alcohol content of the liquid in a beef Burgundy recipe before it went into the oven. Every hour, we sampled the liquid to measure the alcohol concentration, and every time, it had dropped—but not as much as might be expected. After three hours of stewing, the alcohol concentration of the stew liquid had decreased by just 60 percent. A major reason for the retention of alcohol in this dish is the use of a lid. If the surface of the liquid is not ventilated, alcohol vapor will accumulate, reducing further evaporation.
One way to quickly reduce the amount of alcohol in a liquid is to ignite the vapors that lie above the pan, a technique known as flambéing. But the degree to which a flambé will burn off alcohol depends on the temperature of the liquid underneath. In our tests, brandy ignited over high heat retained 29 percent of its original alcohol concentration, while brandy flamed in a cold pan held 57 percent. The diameter of the pan is also a factor; the wider the pan, the more total evaporation. (For more information about flambéing, see here.)
Beer in dark-colored glass bottles tastes better than beer in clear glass bottles.
It’s true—and there’s a scientific reason why.
You may have heard the term “skunky brew.” Turns out that’s an accurate label for what happens to beer when it’s exposed to light. Hops contain bitter molecules called isohumulones, and any type of light—natural or artificial—causes these molecules to produce free radicals. In turn, the free radicals react with a sulfur compound in beer to produce a compound known as MBT, which is a component of skunk spray. It takes very little MBT to produce a skunky off-flavor in beer: Some perceptive tasters have detected as little as one-billionth of a gram per 12 ounces of beer.
Hopefully, your favorite beer comes in cans or amber bottles. At the very least, avoid six-packs of clear glass bottles that have been sitting in the front of a store shelf or at the top of a commercial refrigerator near fluorescent lighting. For the best-tasting beer from start to finish, use a beer cozy to keep your brew cold and to block out as much light as possible from the bottle, be it colored or clear.
Wine needs to be allowed to “breathe” for several hours before you drink it.
This is true only for some wines, and there are easy ways to speed up the process.
Red wines—especially young, undeveloped ones—often benefit from a “breathing” period after opening so that oxygen can break down the tannins and sulfur compounds, which helps soften any harsh flavors. But merely uncorking a bottle and letting it sit for a bit is insufficient. In order to truly aerate wine, you must expose as much of its surface area as possible to oxygen. Typically, this so-called hard decanting is accomplished by pouring the wine into a wide, shallow vessel and letting it rest for up to several hours.
While specialized wine-aerating gadgets can speed things along, immediate decanting can also be done with just two pitchers. We opened several recent-vintage bottles of Cabernet and Sangiovese (both known for their punchy, highly tannic flavors) and held a blind taste test of samples poured straight from the bottle and samples that had been poured back and forth from one pitcher to another 15 times. The results were remarkable: The undecanted wines were astringent and flat; the wines that had been decanted by pouring were bright and balanced, and their tannins were less prominent, with more complex aromas coming to the fore. Use this method the next time you need to let wine breathe in a hurry.
Cocktails that are shaken or stirred should be mixed quickly and not agitated for too long.
As a matter of fact, depending on what kind of cocktail you like, you might want to keep mixing for a while.
Most recipes for a classic martini advise stirring with ice for about 30 seconds. To evaluate whether this was an ideal length of time, we made four martinis, combining 1¼ cups of ice, 3 ounces of gin, and 1 ounce of vermouth in each of four cocktail shakers. We then stirred the martinis for 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute, and 2 minutes, respectively.
Unsurprisingly, the longer a drink was stirred, the colder it got. What did startle us was just how different each martini tasted. Tasters found the martini that was stirred for 15 seconds to have not only a stronger alcohol flavor but also less noticeable aromatic herbal notes. The longer the drink was stirred, the more pronounced these other flavors became.
Why does a colder, more diluted cocktail exhibit a broader spectrum of flavors and aromas? First, chilling makes the harsh-tasting ethanol less volatile and assertive, allowing more pleasant, subtle flavors to come through. Second, the ethanol in gin (and other spirits like whiskey) dissolves some of the water-insoluble aroma compounds. Diluting with water (from the ice) drives these molecules—and their aromas—out of the solution and into the air.
If you’re a fan of stiffer drinks that taste more of ethanol, by all means, stir for only 30 seconds. But if you’d like a martini that’s more aromatic in flavor, be patient and keep stirring for a minute or two.
MSG will give you a headache.
Studies have found no connection between MSG and “Chinese restaurant syndrome.”
In grade school we learned that we experience four primary taste sensations: salty, sweet, bitter, and sour. In recent years, scientists have determined that there is a fifth taste called umami, which is best described as “meaty” or “savory” and is produced by a common amino acid known as glutamate or glutamic acid. Glutamate is present in relatively high amounts in such foods as tomatoes, mushrooms, seaweed, and Parmesan cheese, as well as most proteins, including meat, dairy products, and soy.
MSG (monosodium glutamate) is simply the sodium salt form of naturally occurring glutamate. MSG is believed to enhance the response of our tastebuds, especially to meats and proteins. In our kitchen tests, we have found that MSG bumps up the flavor of food. When we added MSG, in the form of the supermarket product Accent, to our beef and vegetable soup, tasters raved about the “rich,” “ultrabeefy” results. However, MSG has gotten somewhat of a bad rap in the press, in part because of “Chinese restaurant syndrome.” The term was coined in the late 1960s, when people complained of headaches and digestive upset after eating Chinese food and suspected MSG was the cause. However, numerous studies failed to find a link between MSG and these symptoms. Some experts suggest that bacteria growing on room-temperature cooked rice was in fact the culprit. Given the prevalence of MSG in the American food supply today, there is no evidence that this additive causes medical problems.
Dark roast coffee has more caffeine than light roast coffee.
Nope—and if you’re not careful in how you measure, light roast will actually have quite a bit more caffeine.
Roasting is the process that transforms green coffee beans into a far more complex-tasting product, and the degree to which the beans are roasted has as much of an impact on their final profile as their intrinsic flavors. We brewed two pots of coffee, one light roast and one dark roast, using the same volume of ground coffee per batch, and sent both to a lab for testing. When the results came back, we learned that the light roast had much more caffeine than the dark roast—60 percent more in this case. We made two more pots to send to the lab, this time measuring the coffee by weight instead of volume. As we added ground coffee to the scale, we noticed that it took more dark roast than light roast to reach 1½ ounces. Nevertheless, when the results came back, both pots had virtually the same amount of caffeine.
It turns out that as the beans roast, they lose water and also puff up slightly—and the longer the roast time, the more pronounced these effects. Dark roast beans will thus weigh less (and be slightly larger) than light roast beans. When the ground beans are measured by volume, the light roast particles will be denser, weigh more, and contain more caffeine than the dark grinds, producing a more caffeinated brew. The only way to ensure that you’re getting the same amount of caffeine with different roasts (all other variables being equal) is to weigh the coffee. If you measure by volume, you’ll end up with more of a buzz from a light roast than a dark roast.
Oil and vinegar don’t mix.
Left to their own devices, these two liquids won’t naturally combine…but you can make them.
It’s true, oil and vinegar do not ordinarily mix. The only way to combine them is to whisk them together so strenuously that the vinegar breaks down into tiny droplets—eventually so tiny that they remain separated by the oil, evenly suspended throughout it. The two fluids are then effectively one homogeneous mixture, called an emulsion (in this case, a vinaigrette).
Unfortunately, as soon as you stop mixing the oil and vinegar, those tiny dispersed droplets of vinegar will start to find each other and coalesce. When enough vinegar droplets find each other, the emulsion “breaks,” and the vinegar and oil separate again. Then, when you pour the vinaigrette over your greens, you’ll get some oily leaves and some sour leaves, and no delicious salad.
To help an emulsion stay stable for longer, you can include an ingredient that acts as an emulsifier, such as egg yolk or mustard. Emulsifiers work by forming a shield around the dispersed droplets in an emulsion, keeping them from recombining and separating out. This is why we often include a little mustard in our vinaigrette recipes—it might not be enough to noticeably affect the flavor of the dressing, but it can have a serious impact on the chemistry of the mixture.
Never use canned goods that are past their “best by” date.
There’s a lot more leeway in “best by” dates than you might think.
The “best by” date printed on canned foods is not a hard-and-fast “expiration” date: It refers strictly to the manufacturer’s recommendation for peak quality, not safety concerns. In theory, as long as cans are in good shape and have been stored under the right conditions (in a dry place between 40 and 70 degrees), their contents should remain safe to use indefinitely.
That said, natural chemicals in foods continually react with the metal in cans, and over time, canned food’s taste, texture, and nutritional value will gradually deteriorate. The question is when. Manufacturers have an incentive to cite a “best by” date that is a conservative estimate of when the food may lose quality. But it’s possible that some canned foods will last for decades without any dip in taste or nutrition. In a study conducted by the National Food Processors Association and cited in FDA Consumer magazine, even 100-year-old canned food was found to be remarkably well preserved, with a drop in some nutrients but not others.
Dates aside, cans with a compromised seal (punctured, rusted through, or deeply dented along any seam) should never be used. And discard immediately any cans that are bulging or that spurt liquid when opened: These are warning signs of the presence of the rare but dangerous botulism bacteria, Clostridium botulinum.
Baking soda can remove unpleasant odors from your refrigerator or freezer.
Unfortunately, a box of baking soda is not the magic bullet you might hope it would be.
Baking soda is sodium bicarbonate, an alkali used as a leavening agent in baking. To test whether it can also absorb or neutralize odors from the refrigerator or freezer, we placed equal amounts of sour milk, stinky cheese, and spoiled fish in two airtight containers, then added an open box of baking soda to one container and left the second alone. We sealed the samples and let them sit at room temperature. Finally, we asked a panel of “sniffers” to smell each container after 24 hours and again after 48 hours. The results were inconclusive, with some sniffers claiming they couldn’t detect much difference and others swearing they could.
As it turns out, food scientists dismiss the notion that baking soda has deodorizing power in the fridge. While it does neutralize acids, the likelihood of gaseous molecules from acidic sour milk migrating through the refrigerator and interacting with the baking soda is slight. No single chemical has the ability to deactivate all the complex gaseous chemicals that make things smell bad.
But don’t rule out baking soda altogether. When this alkaline powder comes into direct contact with smells, it can in fact make a difference. We recently tested different approaches to removing garlic and onion smells from a cutting board and found that scrubbing with a paste of 1 tablespoon baking soda and 1 teaspoon water was the most effective option.
You should never use soap on a cast-iron pan.
A little dish soap will not ruin a well-seasoned cast-iron pan.
When fat is heated at a certain temperature for a particular length of time, it forms a coating of polymerized triglyceride molecules on the surface of the pan. To keep food from sticking to or reacting with the metal of a cast-iron pan, you need to develop and maintain that coating, known as seasoning. By applying oil to the pan and heating that oil, you can cause the fat molecules in the oil to break down and reorganize into a layer of new molecules that adhere to the pan, creating a fairly durable surface that acts much like an all-natural Teflon coating. But many sources caution that using dish soap on a seasoned cast-iron pan will degrade the seasoning and ruin the pan.
In the process of developing recipes in the test kitchen, we have generated hundreds of dirty cast-iron skillets and thus had plenty of opportunities to test different cleaning methods. We experimented with a variety of cleansers, including dish soap and scouring powders. We found that a small amount of dish soap is not enough to interfere with the polymerized bonds that make up the protective layer on the surface of a well-seasoned cast-iron skillet. Don’t scrub the pan with abrasives like steel wool or use harsh cleansers like Comet, and don’t soak the pan, but it’s OK to use a few drops of regular dish soap if you need to clean up a particularly greasy pan, or even if that just makes you feel more comfortable. Just rinse the pan clean and wipe it dry when you’re finished.
You should never cook acidic ingredients in cast-iron cookware.
You certainly can—as long as you follow some simple rules.
When acidic ingredients are cooked in cast iron for an extended period of time, trace amounts of molecules from the metal can loosen and leach into the food. Although these minute amounts are not harmful to consume, they may impart unwanted metallic flavors, and the pan’s seasoning can be damaged as well. To test how fast this happens and how noticeable it is, we made a highly acidic tomato sauce and simmered it in a well-seasoned cast-iron skillet, testing it every 15 minutes to check for off-flavors and damage to the pan. Our tasters could detect metallic flavors in the tomato sauce only after it had simmered for a full 30 minutes.
So, while an acidic sauce can enjoy a brief stay in a cast-iron pan with no dire consequences, you have to be careful. First, make sure your pan is well seasoned, as seasoning keeps the acid from interacting with the iron—to a point. You should also remove acidic dishes from the warm skillet soon after they finish cooking. (These rules do not apply to enameled cast-iron skillets; the enamel coating makes it safe to cook acidic ingredients for any length of time.) If you do accidentally oversimmer an acidic ingredient, you may have to throw out the food, but you can simply reseason your skillet and get back to cooking in it again; it won’t cause any permanent damage.
Plastic cutting boards are more sanitary than wooden ones.
Maintenance, not material, provides the greatest margin of safety when it comes to cutting boards.
We asked four staff members to donate their used boards, two wooden and two plastic, to our testing efforts. We found very little bacteria growing on these boards when we sampled them, so we took the boards to a local lab to have them artificially inoculated with bacteria. A drop of a medium containing millions of bacteria was placed on each board, the boards were left to sit for 40 minutes to allow for absorption of the bacteria, and an attempt was then made to recover the bacteria. In repeated tests, between 6.0 and 8.1 percent of the bacteria were recovered from the plastic and between 1.3 and 6.2 percent from the wood. Given that the number of bacteria recovered from each type of board was well into the hundreds of thousands, there was little to assure us that one was any safer than the other.
Scrubbing the boards with hot, soapy water changed the story drastically. Once the contaminated boards had been cleaned, we recovered an average of only 0.00015 percent from the plastic and 0.00037 percent from the wood—or fewer than 100 bacteria from each board. So, while both plastic and wooden boards can hold on to bacteria for long periods of time and can thus allow for transference of bacteria to foods, we found that scrubbing with hot, soapy water was an effective (though not perfect) way of cleaning both kinds of boards. The USDA also recommends the regular application of a solution of 1 teaspoon of bleach per quart of water to all types of cutting boards.
Simply put, use whichever type of board you want, but make sure to keep it clean and well maintained.
Pyrex dishes can shatter when you cook in them.
There is a small chance of this happening, but you can minimize the risk.
Shattering is relatively rare, but it can happen when tempered glassware such as Pyrex is exposed to sudden temperature changes (known as thermal shock), extremely high heat (over 425 degrees), or direct heat. In fact, we have experienced three such incidents in the test kitchen.
Precautions you can take to avoid shattering include fully preheating the oven before placing glassware inside (to avoid exposure to the very high temperatures that some ovens initially use to jump-start preheating); covering the bottom of the dish with a little liquid prior to cooking foods that may release juices (to keep the temperature of the dish even); placing hot glassware on a dry cloth or trivet (to avoid contact with a cool or wet surface); never placing glassware on a burner or under the broiler; never adding liquid to hot glassware; and never moving a glass dish directly from the freezer to the oven or vice versa. Both of the leading glassware brands in this country, Anchor Hocking and World Kitchen (the U.S. manufacturer of Pyrex) offer more detailed instructions on all packaging and on their websites.
Clear glass cookware has many advantages: It’s inexpensive, provides even browning, and makes it easy to monitor progress. But if you want to avoid glassware altogether when baking, we recommend broiler-safe ceramic baking dishes.
Some people are good cooks and others are bad cooks—that’s just the way it is!
Anyone can become a good cook, but it does take some effort!
What separates success from failure in the kitchen? It’s the ability to think on your feet and make adjustments as you cook. And, despite what you might think, years of experience and a natural predilection for cooking aren’t prerequisites for being a good cook (although they do help). Cooking is a skill that can take a lifetime to master, and even the best cooks occasionally produce disappointing results. Cooking isn’t complicated, but it is complex. Small variables can have a significant effect on the quality of the finished dish.
We think everyone should start by learning the basics, such as how to read a recipe, how to sharpen a knife, and how to measure properly. Good cooking requires a solid foundation in all these essentials, from key techniques to knowing your ingredients to understanding how seasoning works. You also have to get to know your own particular tastes; each person’s palate is unique.
To some extent, good cooking is about familiarity and predictability. There are definite calculable, scientific aspects to the culinary arts, and once you understand the whys and hows of cooking, you’re much more likely to use the proper techniques. But you also have to know the rules before you can efficiently and effectively break them. Once you have a handle on the basics, that’s when creativity begins. And that’s why we have one final word of advice: Be inquisitive in the kitchen. That may be the most important lesson we can teach anyone who wants to become a better cook.
Chefs know how to calculate ingredient amounts and measurements almost instinctively, but for the home cook those kinds of calculations are not always so easy. This is worrisome, because a misstep in measuring can be costly—and potentially ruin a dish. Whether your tablespoon measure has gone missing for the moment or you want to halve or double a recipe, this chart will help. Ounce measurements are for liquids only.
Equivalent Measures
| 3 teaspoons | = 1 tablespoon | |
| 4 tablespoons | = ¼ cup | |
| 5 tablespoons + 1 teaspoon | = ⅓ cup | |
| 8 tablespoons | = ½ cup | |
| 10 tablespoons + 2 teaspoons | = ⅔ cup | |
| 12 tablespoons | = ¾ cup | |
| 16 tablespoons | = 1 cup | = 8 fluid ounces |
| 2 cups | = 1 pint | = 16 fluid ounces |
| 2 pints | = 1 quart | = 32 fluid ounces |
| 2 quarts | = ½ gallon | = 64 fluid ounces |
| 4 quarts | = 1 gallon | = 128 fluid ounces |
Conversions for Common Baking Ingredients
Baking is an exacting science. Because measuring by weight is far more accurate than measuring by volume, and thus more likely to yield reliable results, in our recipes we provide ounce measures in addition to cup measures for many ingredients. Refer to the chart below to convert these measures into grams.
| Ingredient | Ounces | Grams |
| 1 cup all-purpose flour* | 5 | 142 |
| 1 cup cake flour | 4 | 113 |
| 1 cup whole-wheat flour | 5½ | 156 |
| 1 cup granulated (white) sugar | 7 | 198 |
| 1 cup packed brown sugar (light or dark) | 7 | 198 |
| 1 cup confectioners’ sugar | 4 | 113 |
| 1 cup cocoa powder | 3 | 85 |
| Butter** | ||
| 4 tablespoons (½ stick, or ¼ cup) | 2 | 57 |
| 8 tablespoons (1 stick, or ½ cup) | 4 | 113 |
| 16 tablespoons (2 sticks, or 1 cup) | 8 | 227 |
* U.S. all-purpose flour does not contain leaveners, as some European flours do. These leavened flours are called self-rising or self-raising. If you are using self-rising flour, take this into consideration before adding leavening to a recipe.
** In the United States, butter is sold both salted and unsalted. We generally recommend unsalted butter. If you are using salted butter, take this into consideration before adding salt to a recipe.