Best Food Writing 2010 Part 11

THE JUICY SECRET TO SEASONING MEAT.

By Oliver Strand From Food & Wine Food & Wine

Like many professional cooks turned freelance food writers, New-York-based Oliver Strand has an impressive reservoir of technical know-how-but he also knows that it doesn't always translate to the home kitchen.

When I started working in restaurants more than 10 years ago, I was taught to season meat with salt and pepper well before cooking. Ideally, a whole chicken would be seasoned a full 24 hours before it was roasted, because salting so far ahead of time, I was told, gives the meat more flavor.

I took the practice as gospel, because that's what you do in a professional kitchen, especially if it's one staffed by talented cooks (which it was) who are making good food (which, in all modesty, we were). When you work in a restaurant, you learn by watching carefully, asking the right questions and following instructions. That's also how you avoid being confronted with the most dreaded question the chef or sous chef could level at you, in front of the rest of the staff: "What do you think you're doing?"

So I felt spun around when I worked in another restaurant where the meat was always seasoned with salt and pepper right before cooking. Salting meat ahead of time, I was now told, dries it out.

Chefs disagree all the time, but rarely about basic technique-and there are few things more basic than sprinkling salt and pepper on steak or short ribs. But after surveying some notable chefs around the country, I discovered a dispute so divisive it's almost ideological. Not only are there two camps, but each side thinks it is categorically right, and the other, painfully wrong. On one side you have New York City chefs Tom Colicchio, of Craft and Top Chef fame, and Jean Francois Bruel of Daniel, both of whom a.s.sert that meat should never be seasoned until just before cooking. (Bruel goes even further with steaks, which he finishes seasoning only after they have been seared or grilled.) And on the other side you have David Tanis of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, and San Francisco's Judy Rodgers, whose The Zuni Cafe Cookbook The Zuni Cafe Cookbook contains an entire section on the art of salting meat ahead of time. There's no geographic pattern. Mario Batali of New York City's Babbo seasons duck legs for confit the day before. Suzanne Goin of Los Angeles's Lucques doesn't. contains an entire section on the art of salting meat ahead of time. There's no geographic pattern. Mario Batali of New York City's Babbo seasons duck legs for confit the day before. Suzanne Goin of Los Angeles's Lucques doesn't.

I have had knockout meals in the restaurants of all these chefs, and I have never thought that the Berkshire pork at Craft needed more flavor, or that the grilled quail at Chez Panisse was dry. Chefs at these culinary heights don't make such obvious mistakes.

But surely there's a correct method, or at least one that's more right than the other. And one that makes more sense for home cooks. In their search for succulence, chefs often turn to practices like brining (almost all the meat dishes are brined-soaked for hours in a salt.w.a.ter solution-at Paul Kahan's pork-centric The Publican, in Chicago), or sous-vide, which calls for using some fairly expensive equipment to slow-cook food in a low-temperature water bath. But I wanted to know what was practical and reasonable when making everyday meals at home. Buying and seasoning a chicken the day before you plan to roast it couldn't be easier. But the question remained: Is it tastier?

Before I conducted my own experiments, I decided to consult with scientist Harold McGee, the author of On Food and Cooking On Food and Cooking and a columnist for the and a columnist for the NewYork Times NewYork Times, where he unravels-and often debunks-a.s.sumptions about cooking. Even though McGee hasn't done controlled tests on the timing of seasoning, he is decidedly in favor of salting meat ahead of time. (He's particularly fond of grinding his own hamburger with seasoned chunks of beef, a recipe from The Zuni Cafe Cookbook The Zuni Cafe Cookbook.) He explained that while a high concentration of salt has a desiccating effect, which is helpful for curing meat, the small amount of salt used to season food has a hydrating effect: Salt helps the cells hold on to water.

That was the theory I wanted to test. I bought a sampling of meats, two pieces of different kinds of cuts-one of which I would season 24 hours ahead of time, the other just one hour before cooking. (Some recipes call for seasoning 48 or even 72 hours in advance; McGee explained that the further ahead of time the meat is seasoned, the more even the distribution of salt. But having to prepare a chicken on Sunday in order to roast it on Wednesday is asking a lot.) I would use the same amount of salt on each piece of meat-three quarters of a teaspoon per pound. I'd also weigh the meat both before salting and just before cooking, to see if seasoning ahead of time drew out juices. (McGee was right: None of the cuts lost water weight from salting.) And I decided to try a variety of cooking techniques. I would roast whole chickens and racks of pork, sear dry-aged rib eyes and braise lamb shanks.

I invited over some opinionated friends for this meal of multiple meat courses, all of which we tasted blind-we were a table of good eaters, people who knew their way around a well-marbled steak and a well-timed critique. But before I started cooking, I realized that I had to prepare myself to be wrong. If I learned that my training was off the mark, and that all these years I'd been making one horrible mistake after another by salting meat the day before cooking it, then I had to be willing to change my methods. The truth? I can handle the truth.

And I can easily handle two chickens. I roasted both for about 45 minutes at 475 degrees, which is in line with what professional kitchens do. I didn't add any ingredients to enhance the flavor (b.u.t.ter, olive oil, spices or herbs), just salt and pepper.

The skins of both birds became crispy and golden in the oven, the b.r.e.a.s.t.s juicy and delicious. But the skin of the chicken that was seasoned just before roasting tasted saltier than the meat, and while I'm not sure I'd have noticed it on its own, when I sampled it next to the other chicken it seemed clumsy, an amateur effort. The chicken that had been seasoned the day before was more flavorful, but more than that, it tasted more balanced. And just as McGee had theorized, it was more succulent.

Next were the dry-aged rib eyes. I was careful to use good technique, letting the meat come to room temperature before searing it in a cast-iron pan and letting it rest afterward. Both Tom Colicchio and Suzanne Goin had stressed the importance of these fundamentals. "There are so many factors you need to pay attention to, and salt is just one of them," Colicchio had said.

When I served the two steaks at a b.l.o.o.d.y medium-rare, everybody could immediately tell which rib eye was seasoned when. But there was no consensus on which one was better. Rob, a chef, said he liked how the salt flavored the fat of the steak that was seasoned the day before, and Christine, my wife, thought it tasted more aged. But Kerry, who eats out more than anybody I know, leaned toward the brighter flavor of the steak salted right before cooking. That was also the preference of Mark (though he might be biased: His wife is from Argentina, where steaks are seasoned with coa.r.s.e salt just before grilling).

I didn't feel strongly either way-which was its own judgment. To me, both steaks were equally juicy and tasty. As a matter of practicality, picking up a good steak after work and cooking it that night is just fine.

But then I served the two pork racks. This time, there was a strong consensus: The one salted just before roasting was clearly moister and more delicious. The pork seasoned the day before was so dry, it was the most disappointing thing we ate.

And we were just as unanimous when it came to the braised lamb shanks: The lamb seasoned the day before was exquisite, dramatically better than the other. If the pork was the evening's least inspired dish, this was the most delicious. It had less to do with a discernible saltiness than the overall composition of flavors. It tasted richer, fuller, meatier. Simply put, it tasted more like lamb. The shanks were as close to a revelation as you'll find in an enameled cocotte. "I never thought salting ahead would have this profound an effect," Rob said. "Braising is so forgiving, it's low and slow, and there's all the flavor from the other ingredients, but this lamb is amazing. There's no comparison."

It was a conclusive end to an eye-opening evening. I had expected to arrive at a hard-and-fast, one-size-fits-all principle, and instead, I arrived at a series of answers weighted by the most practical concern of all: What's worth the effort? Some of cooking is art, and some of it is skill, but much of it is logistics, a question of timing and s.p.a.ce and making sure you have enough parsnips, say, to feed your guests, but not so many that they crowd the pan and steam instead of roast. What's true at home is also true in a professional kitchen, though we go out to restaurants precisely because they do things we wouldn't or couldn't do ourselves. I couldn't help but think that some chefs don't season in advance because it's a bother.

But really, it takes no extra effort, just some forethought. And so I will always season lamb shanks the day before they go into the braise. I will try to season chickens the day before, but if I don't have the chance, I won't sweat it; and I will season steaks and pork roasts right before searing. Not only can I handle the truth, I can handle several truths.

FEED IT OR IT DIES.

By William Alexander From 52 Loaves 52 Loaves

Sure, he has a full-time day job in a research lab in upstate New York-but that didn't prevent William Alexander (also author of The $64 Tomato The $64 Tomato) from plunging into a quixotic quest to bake the perfect loaf of bread-and then writing a tremendously entertaining book about it.

Week 20 "Feed the b.i.t.c.h!" said the voice on the phone. "Feed the b.i.t.c.h or she'll die!" "Feed the b.i.t.c.h!" said the voice on the phone. "Feed the b.i.t.c.h or she'll die!"

-ANTHONY BOURDAIN, Kitchen Confidential, 2000

I was as nervous as a sinner in the first pew, which may have partly explained the undersized, dense, and misshapen loaf I'd just baked, the least attractive one I'd made in months of bread making. was as nervous as a sinner in the first pew, which may have partly explained the undersized, dense, and misshapen loaf I'd just baked, the least attractive one I'd made in months of bread making.

Zach took one look at it and winced. "Ooh. Doorstop."

Even worse, one of the four crosshatch slashes had blown out as if a hand grenade had gone off inside, leaving a large tumor on that side of the loaf, while the other three cuts were mere scratches that hadn't opened up at all. This had happened because my fancy ten-dollar lame lame was already dull and ready to be tossed in the garbage. If ever I wanted a loaf to turn out well, it was this one, for I was on my way to a weekend with Charles van Over, bread authority and author. I was hoping that van Over could diagnose my airless and tight-crumbed peasant loaf. was already dull and ready to be tossed in the garbage. If ever I wanted a loaf to turn out well, it was this one, for I was on my way to a weekend with Charles van Over, bread authority and author. I was hoping that van Over could diagnose my airless and tight-crumbed peasant loaf.

I kissed Katie good-bye.

"Dad, what if he tells you your 'lousy' bread is great? That'd be pretty embarra.s.sing. What do you say then?"

"I guess I'd feel pretty foolish." But the odds of that happening were about nil. I eyed the loaf, so sorry-looking I had seriously considered "forgetting" it to save face. But, I reasoned, if you're going to the proctologist, you'd better be prepared to drop your pants, so, loaf and overnighter in hand, Anne and I headed out to van Over's home overlooking the Connecticut River.

Charlie greeted us warmly and went right for the bread knife.

"This is very good bread," he said, chewing on a lopsided slice. "Better than what you'll get in most bakeries."

Huh?

"But there are no air holes," I protested.

He held it up to the window to better see the texture. "Nice. You don't want air holes in bread like this. A peasant loaf is sandwich bread."

Oh. I hadn't known that.

"But it's too moist inside," I protested again.

"Leave it in the oven a half hour after baking. It'll dry out. Bill, I'm serious, this is really good bread."

I could see Katie smirking in our kitchen a hundred miles away.

"I'm not happy with the spongy texture. I want a much more open, webbed crumb, an alveolar alveolar crumb," I argued, using the wonderfully evocative word I'd swiped from Steven Kaplan-"the Professor" (as Charlie called him)-who'd hooked us up. crumb," I argued, using the wonderfully evocative word I'd swiped from Steven Kaplan-"the Professor" (as Charlie called him)-who'd hooked us up.

"You're not going to get that with this bread.You've gone about as far with this bread as you can go, but now you need to go to the next level. Have you ever used a starter?"

Oh, jeez, a starter. No way.

A starter is a batter or dough of flour, water, wild yeast, and bacteria (in other words, a sourdough, or in French a levain levain15) that you maintain with regular "feedings" of flour and water for years or even generations. It can be used either in place of or with commercial yeast. I had thought about it a couple of times but had been frightened off by the demands of caring for it. The celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain described his baker's levain levain this way: this way: A ma.s.sive, foaming, barely contained heap . . . which even now was pushing up the weighted-down lid of a 35-gallon Lexan container and spilling over the work table where it was stored. A ma.s.sive, foaming, barely contained heap . . . which even now was pushing up the weighted-down lid of a 35-gallon Lexan container and spilling over the work table where it was stored.

Then there were worried posts like this to a professional bakers' Internet forum: I am wondering what one does during holidays to feed their levain-besides the obvious going in to feed it. We feed ours 2 times a day. The levain is going to miss 2 feedings. I will be sleeping and it can die before I go in to feed it. I am wondering what one does during holidays to feed their levain-besides the obvious going in to feed it. We feed ours 2 times a day. The levain is going to miss 2 feedings. I will be sleeping and it can die before I go in to feed it.

Feed it twice a day, every day, or it dies dies? I don't always manage to feed my kids twice a day! Who needed this ha.s.sle?

"I don't know, Charlie. It seems like a lot of work."

"Not if you keep it in the refrigerator." He pulled a one-gallon recycled plastic container marked "Creme Fraiche" out of his fridge.

"You only have to feed it once a week. I got this from a friend in Alaska who asked me to take care of it while he did some traveling."

He opened it up. It had an acrid, but not particularly unpleasant or sour, smell.

"How long ago was that?"

"Twelve years."

I gulped. My neighbors wouldn't trust me to water their house-plants for a week while they're away. "I don't know. . . ."

"I'll give you some to take home. It's the only way you're going to bake the kind of bread you're after." We had a delicious lunch on Charlie's patio and returned to the kitchen to make bread (using Charlie's twelve-year-old levain levain, of course) in, of all things, a food processor.

"You ever make bread in a food processor?" Charlie asked.

I was tempted to answer in my W.C. Fields voice, "No, and if I did, I wouldn't admit it." Food processor? What kind of baker was this?

"WHAT EXACTLY DOES HE DO?" I asked Charlie's baker, Skip, at five o'clock the next morning while he formed baguettes in the kitchen of the Copper Beech Inn in Ivoryton. In the early mornings the inn's kitchen became, under Charlie's auspices, a small commercial bakery, doing one thing but doing it extremely well, baking a single type of bread (baguettes) for a single client (the inn). Having spent a full day with Charlie, I still couldn't quite figure out exactly who he was or what he did. Former restaurateur and baker, occasional food industry consultant, author, inventor of the folding bread knife and the HearthKit oven insert (a three-sided baking stone meant to simulate baking in a brick oven), proselytizer, bon vivant, chef, bread authority, tinkerer, Jacques Pepin's boules boules partner-none of these really captured the essence of this youthful seventy-year-old who, above all, was pa.s.sionate about bread. partner-none of these really captured the essence of this youthful seventy-year-old who, above all, was pa.s.sionate about bread.

"Charlie's a concept person," Skip said, a smile crossing his face. "He likes ideas. Big ideas."

His biggest idea to date is that the best way to knead bread, whether at home or in a bakery, is in a food processor, a method he discovered practically by accident when asked to prepare bread for a party honoring the president of Cuisinart. Van Over was so impressed with the result-and the ease of preparation-that he patented the process for commercial bakeries. One would not expect dough subjected to a razor-sharp metal blade whirring at over 1,300 rpm to make good bread or anything else, but I had sampled a baguette the previous night at dinner and thought it among the best I'd ever eaten.

Charlie attributes the technique's success partly to the fact that the kneading time is short-forty-five seconds-and does not whip air into the dough the way a commercial dough hook does as it lifts and stretches-and aerates-the dough over a ten- or fifteen-minute kneading.

"I thought flour needed oxygen," I'd asked in his kitchen. "Isn't that why it has to age for several weeks after milling?"

True, but once the flour is mixed with water and becomes dough, oxygenation destroys the beta-carotenes in flour and can cause the flour to break down, Charlie had said. His explanation echoed the words of the French bread authority Raymond Calvel, the scientist who'd come up with the technique he dubbed auto-lyse, letting the dough rest and condition before kneading.

In the kitchen, Skip now added instant yeast, water, and salt to the flour and processed it for just forty-five seconds, then went home to have breakfast while the dough fermented. He'd return at eight to make the bread. Later that morning, the baking finished, Charlie came in with a tub of starter for me. He mentioned that he and his wife, Priscilla, were on their way to France in a few weeks.

"Oh, really?" I said. "You wouldn't happen to know of any ancient monasteries over there that still bake bread, would you?" Brother Boniface, the ancient baker at Mepkin Abbey, might be deceased, but the appeal of his ancientness had stayed with me. "I like old things," I explained as we stood in the inn's gleaming, modern stainless steel kitchen. "I think it'd be neat to make bread in a place where they've been baking for a really long time, you know, to get in touch with the tradition."

"I suspect you'll have a hard time finding one," Charlie said, adding that, as an atheist, he wasn't really in touch with that world. "That's a dying tradition. But I'll ask around. Do you know Peter Reinhart? He's written a couple of books on bread, and he's a former monk or something. He might know."

Charlie handed over the levain levain. "Just feed it at least once a week with equal parts flour and water." By weight, he meant. "Leave it out for a few hours after each feeding, then keep it in the fridge. It's like having an undemanding pet."

During the long drive home, Anne kept glancing nervously into the backseat at the starter. I asked her what she was so jittery about.

"Remember friendship bread?"

I almost drove off the road.

Week 21 With Friendships Like This . . .

Friendship is not so simple.

-ALBERT CAMUS

"Eeek!" Anne had screamed that fateful day as she opened the refrigerator door. She jumped clear across the room, fulfilling the foreboding I always have upon returning home after a vacation. As I approach our street, I often think I smell smoke, confirming the vague dread I've had all week that the electrical wiring I did without a permit in 1992 has shorted and the house is now a charred wreck. Or the water pipes have burst. Or I left the back door wide open and a family of deer has taken possession of our living room. Not that my neurosis is totally unfounded. We have in fact returned after a week away to find the unreliable front door blown wide open (but no deer or burglars present-the house was apparently too cold for either) and water dripping from the light fixtures. But none of my worries had ever included the refrigerator.

"Calm down," I said, a.s.suming that the milk jug had leaked again. I have an amazing skill for buying the one jug out of sixty that has a pinhole leak in the bottom. I opened the refrigerator.

"Yow!" I cried, jumping backward and slamming the door. "What is that?"

"I don't know," Anne said, "but we're going to need a bigger boat."

"Or Steve McQueen. It looks like the Blob."

Having exhausted our Hollywood a.n.a.logies, we cautiously approached the refrigerator like a couple of timid explorers entering a cave.

"You go first," Anne said.

I cracked open the door. Slime rolled out onto the floor. What a mess. A glutinous, beige gook was draped over everything on the top two shelves and the inside of the door. Some of it had hardened onto the walls of the refrigerator, creeping into every crevice, coating every surface. In other places it was still fresh and very much alive. Anne spotted the culprit-a one-quart plastic container with the words "Friendship Bread" written on it. The lid had blown off and was nowhere in sight. Anne gingerly picked up the container even as ooze continued to flow over the top, like an active volcano, and dropped it into the garbage.

"Martha's friendship bread," she muttered with disgust as we started mopping up the mess. Several weeks earlier, our babysitter had given us this mysterious container of friendship bread starter, onto which was taped an index card with the recipe for baking friendship bread, plus instructions on pa.s.sing the starter along.

Apparently it was a well-established tradition in town. Of Amish origin (so the story goes), the idea is to pa.s.s this container of bread starter from neighbor to neighbor. If you're lucky enough to have it find you, the instructions call for letting this yeast culture ferment at room temperature for four days before adding equal parts flour, sugar(!), and milk(!!). After letting it sit another five days at room temperature(!!!), you use one-third of it to make your "bread" and pa.s.s on the other two-thirds, along with feeding instructions and the bread recipe, to not one but two unsuspecting neighbors.

Rather than being appreciative of this gift, we found ourselves faced with an unplanned project that we had to deal with, ready or not. "My people," Anne noted dryly-meaning the Irish-"bake the bread before giving it away."

"Sounds like a gastronomic chain letter," I mused, rather wary of ingesting this substance that had been sitting on countless countertops around town for who knows how many weeks, months, or even years. What really caught my attention was the warning, "DO NOT USE METAL SPOON OR BOWL!" Why? Was it corrosive?

"We're terrible people, aren't we?" Anne said. "It is a nice way for a community to bond."

"That's what Jim Jones said as he was serving up the Kool-Aid. Look at this recipe. A cup of oil, a cup of sugar, and . . . vanilla pudding? This isn't bread, it's a Twinkie." Still, we couldn't very well just throw it out. So until we could figure out exactly what to do with it, we stuck it in the fridge. And promptly forgot about it and went on vacation. But it didn't forget about us. While we were lounging on a North Carolina beach, growing fat on Carbon's Golden Malted waffles, the Blob was growing fat on sugar and spoiled milk, growing and growing and growing and finally bursting from the confines of its plastic Chinese-soup-container prison.

"I'm never going to get this refrigerator clean," Anne muttered as we mopped, wiped, sc.r.a.ped, and rinsed for the next hour. This wasn't mere hyperbole. The hardened slime was more difficult to remove than old paint, and we would ultimately end up throwing out the refrigerator. It was due to be replaced soon, anyway.

In truth, friendship bread did sound like a nice tradition, and this is how bread had been sustained for thousands of years. The Egyptians, you'll recall, didn't use yeast from a foil packet in the refrigerator; they saved a bit of the dough as a starter from each day's kneading to kick off the next day's bread. And I'm sure they pa.s.sed a little starter along to family members and neighbors, though probably absent the warning about metal utensils.

NOW, WITH CHARLIE'S twelve-year-old starter from Alaska in the refrigerator, I had joined that tradition, and I was secretly rather happy and proud about it. Twelve years old. But would it give me the alveolar, netted crumb that Charlie had promised? I just hoped that I could keep the beast alive long enough to find out.

The next weekend I baked my first loaf of peasant bread using Charlie's levain levain. I was hooked. The naturally leavened dough rose slowly (even with the dash of instant yeast Charlie recommended to give the levain levain a little boost) and not as high as a commercial-yeast-risen dough-in fact, it hardly rose at all-but making bread this way felt pure and was immensely satisfying. The question was, how would it taste, and, more to the point, would the a little boost) and not as high as a commercial-yeast-risen dough-in fact, it hardly rose at all-but making bread this way felt pure and was immensely satisfying. The question was, how would it taste, and, more to the point, would the levain levain give me my gas holes? give me my gas holes?

At dinner, I sliced off the end piece and held it up for everyone to see.

"Holes!" Katie cried.