[gastronomy, Patreon] How to Cook [Read in black and white]
As those of you who have been following me for a while know, in the last few years I've taken up cooking in a more serious way. Exigencies of health and economics made it necessary that I move beyond heating things out of boxes and cans, and also eating out a lot. So I think of myself as someone who has been learning to cook.
I thought today I would share with my readers some of my hard-won knowledge, for anybody else who is learning to cook, or who might be teaching someone else how to cook.
Now, obviously, this is just my opinions and approach. There are probably many other ways to cook, and I am not the boss of you. Nevertheless, for simplicity's sake I have framed this as a set of directives. Feel free to adapt for your own tastes and needs. I, myself, do not always do everything as I have set it out here.
How to Cook
0. Have something to eat. Cooking involves a lot of executive function, and that's hard to do with low blood sugar. If you're planning on winging it without following a fixed recipe, that's even more taxing, cognitively speaking.
1. Evaluate your physical condition for the cooking you plan on doing. Review the steps in your cooking plan to make sure you are physically up to your plan, or change your plan. It could be bad to, e.g., be most of the way through preparing an elaborate roast only to realize that due to a pulled back muscle, it is impossible for you to bear the weight of the pan with the roast in it while simultaneously bending low enough to get it in the oven.
2. Change into your cooking clothes. Bleach and curry are forever.
3. If you have long hair that needs to be fastened out of the way, do that.
4. If you require vision correction for near-vision tasks, e.g. bifocals, find them and apply them to your face.
5. Since this is not a “how to shop for groceries” post, we will take it for granted that you have already done that, determining what you will need and going to get it. Now go figure out where you put each and every one of your necessary ingredients when you brought them home from the store.
6. Double check to make sure you do in fact have all the ingredients that you will need to make what you intend. If following a recipe, review the actual recipe and not your memory of the recipe. If you're improvising, now is a good time to reacquaint yourself with the state of your staple stores. If you find yourself thinking anything about substitutions like, “I don't have an onion, but that's okay, I can just use frozen onion,” stick your nose in the damned freezer and make sure you actually have frozen onion.
7. Review the stores of any disposables you will require, e.g. ziplocs for marinading meat, muffin cups for baking muffins, cooking twine for binding meat, cheese cloth, slow cooker liners, paper towels, tin foil, plastic wrap, cooking parchment, vinyl gloves, trash bags, composting bags. Both locate them, and be sure to look in the containers to make ensure there is actually a sufficiency of what you require.
8. Make sure you have whatever cleaning supplies you will need to clean up during and afterwards: dish soap, brillos, sponges, bleach, iodophor, etc.
9. If any of your ingredients required in-advance preparation process (e.g. defrosting, marinading, fermenting) check to make sure they have completed the process and are ready for use.
10. If you are planning on making a large volume of food that will require either freezing or refrigeration, check that the space is available in the freezer or refrigerator, respectively.
11. If necessary, adjust the temperature of your cooking space. (I.e. if about to run the oven for a few hours, maybe turn down the thermostat or turn up the AC or open the windows or whatever.)
12. Put away all the dishes in the dish drainer or dish washer. This will help with the later equipment steps; also, you can't wash up as you work if you have no place to put the washed or to-be-washed dishes.
13. Clean any dishes soaking in the sink or anywhere else or otherwise in need of cleaning. If you filled the dish drainer or dish washer, you should consider waiting until the dishes have dried or the dish washer has run and going back to step 12, rather than proceeding past step 23. The steps 12 to 23 can be done while dishes dry/are mechanically washed.
14. Check the status of the trash bin. If you don't have any room in there for more trash, take the trash out, and put in a fresh trash bag. Ditto for any recycling bin or composting bin you may have.
15. Review the recipe or plan for the requisite cooking equipment. This is best done by reading through the recipe or thinking through the plan and visualizing each step as you go, and making note of what equipment would be required. Note cooking vessels, mixing vessels, measuring tools (cups, spoons, scales, thermometers), prep surfaces (cutting board, pastry marble, etc.), knives, openers (can opener, cap snaffler, etc.), utensils (spoons, forks, ladles, tongs, whisks, etc.), heat management tools (trivets, mitts), serving vessels and utensils (if necessary), and any others; locate them and ensure their readiness for use. If you are planning on substituting one piece of equipment for another you lack, make that decision now and make a note of it.
16. Review the equipment requirements for resource contention and bottlenecks: a four burner stove can't have five pots going at once, and presumably you have an only finite number of mixing bowls. Remember that all packages of food must be dispensed into some other container for inspection before being added into the container with all the other ingredients; just because that package of sliced button mushrooms says “fresh and clean!” doesn't mean it's telling the truth. Account for these additional containers. Check your plan for practicality, or adjust your plan.
17. Figure out which appliances you will need and review or inspect them for readiness. After you've separated two dozen eggs is a lousy time to remember the oven isn't working. If you are planning on using a slow cooker, make sure it is clean and ready to go. If you are planning on baking something in an oven, take a look into the oven to see if there's anything in there that shouldn't be; also, now is the ideal time, when the oven is cold, to position the racks to where you will need them.
18. If your region or cooking facility is prone to outages, check to make sure the services you will need (e.g. electricity, gas, water) are functioning. If you note scheduled outages on a calendar, check it now and adjust your plan accordingly.
19. If your appliances will need to be deployed from storage, pull them now and figure out where they will go in your cooking space. If they will not all fit at once, figure out what you will be doing for staging.
20. Inspect dish towels for cleanliness, and if inadequate, chuck in hamper and pull fresh ones out.
21. If you are planning on cooking in bulk for subsequent storage or distribution (e.g. leftovers, freezing, gift-giving), make sure you have the requisite storage containers located and ready to use.
22. Make sure your prep and cook surfaces are clean and ready to use. Make sure you haven't used up your cleaning supplies doing so.
23. Make sure your staging areas, if any, are clear and ready to use. If the dish drainer or dish washer are full again, wait until they are ready to empty and then empty them.
24. If you require any medical interventions before cooking – pre-dosing with analgesics, stretches before lifting, e.g. – do that. If you take meds daily, check to make sure you haven't forgotten; if you take scheduled medications, reflect on whether your cooking schedule will intersect with a scheduled dose, and plan accordingly. When you're up to your elbows in raw chicken is a bad moment to need to take your AZT or suddenly realize you forgot to take your Adderall.
25. (Optional) Turn on auditory entertainment.
26. If you haven't already, wash your hands or put on your gloves.
27. Make the food.
28. If you're going to eat or serve the food, do that now.
29. If you are planning on storing the food, and are planning on labeling the packages of food, go find the writing utensil. If you are planning on storing in ziplocs, consider labeling the ziplocs before putting the food in them, while they are still flat, room-temperature, and dry. Then package up the remaining food, and refrigerate, freeze, shelve, give away, etc. as appropriate.
30. If the temperature of your space needs to be de-adjusted, do that now.
31. Clean up all the equipment, including appliances, that you used cooking. Put things that need drying in a place and configuration in which they can dry.
32. Clean the space in which you cooked. Sanitize any surface that contacted or might have contacted raw meat.
33. Review the state of the trash, recycling, and composting bins; take out as needed and replace bags.
34. If you require any post-activity medical interventions, e.g. analgesics, moisturizing your hands, do that now.
35. Review the state of your stores of ingredients, disposables, and cleaning supplies. If in this cooking you exhausted or came near exhausting any of your staples, update your shopping list now to replace them.
36. Once dried, put away equipment and appliances that needed drying. Put back into storage any equipment that belongs in storage.
I wrote this because I have literally never encountered anybody talk about cooking on this… level of abstraction, for want of a better term. We use the term “cooking” both to refer to the characteristic steps of putting food together (the steps that make eggs a quiche and not a soufflé) and to the general, larger enterprise of providing oneself and/or others food made from scratch, but as I think I've illustrated, they're quite different things.
I'm willing to bet that these are the things that make “cooking” hard for the novice. Following a recipe is pretty easy if it's not too techniquey; it's the not getting caught by surprise by resource limitations or resource contentions that screw up timing that's the tricky bit. Itemizing them, as I've done here, is a remedy for that.
It's also what makes cooking so damned demanding for those who don't start with a lot of energy to begin with. The word “just” crops up way too much in discussions of cooking; the activity and its demands are minimized in a way which is deeply unhelpful. Not only does it give a mistaken impression of the work that goes into cooking, it makes people who discover that all this work is entailed by the process think there must be something wrong with them that it's not “just” quick and easy for them. I hope I've done a bit to put paid to that.
These steps get faster and easier with practice – though more complex and time consuming the more involved a cooking project it is and the bigger a scale it reaches and the tighter the logistical constraints. Some steps, with practice and good maintenance habits, can collapse down to less than a minute. (“Can I see the dish soap and a steel-wool pad? Yes? Eight: check!”) If you keep putting things away, well you might not have any dishes to empty from your dish drainer or dish washer, or any unwashed dishes that need handling before you start cooking. But it is also risky to skate through them. That's where hard-to-recover from errors come from. Man, is it hard to fake a ball of kitchen twine.
It seems to me this level of abstraction is often missing from the body of instruction for lots of crafts. There must be a million YouTube videos of music instruction, but I've never seen any how-to for how to do a gig from arrival to departure. The theory and craft of acting fills books, but almost entirely the part that happens on the stage. These things I think most everyone learns (of those who learn them) by immersion, which is how I learned them.
And despite seeing an endless array of programming documentation, I've never seen a discussion of the craft of programming at this level of abstraction. That was far and away the most deterring part of learning to program: how to set up (or find) my development environment, how call the language, how to orient myself to the work, how to organize my tools, even what tools I should have. These things were hard-to-impossible to learn by immersion, because programming is (usually) a pretty solitary activity.
I understand that my graduate school was better than most about providing this sort of information about the practice of therapy, but it was informal and oral, and it still was very weak; perhaps someday I will write the same sort of instructions as I did here for cooking, only for treating patients.
I wish we had a name for this level of abstraction around a human activity. I think a lot of fields might be benefited by having such a term to prompt them into considering it a mete topic for instruction.
Source: Siderea, http://siderea.livejournal.com/1261434.html