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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
If you really want to learn how to cook -- as opposed to learning how to "entertain" -- stick with these two shows.
Dec 2, 2004 | My mom served up boiled sweet potatoes, seasoned only with salt and pepper, this Thanksgiving. My boyfriend might have done the same, last year. But for our own intimate Thanksgiving dinner for two this year, Leonard expertly braised his sweet potatoes in butter, cream and sugar, yielding yams so perfect I gobbled them down with embarrassing zeal.
As Leonard gets to be a better and better cook, I find myself inviting people over to his house for dinner, and last month I finally stopped trying to convince myself that my jeans had just shrunk in the wash.
How did my engineer boyfriend learn to cook so well? Certainly not from watching the food shows the cable TV channels dish up in abundance. The personality-driven recipe files of Emeril Lagasse, Nigella Lawson, Rachael Ray, Jamie Oliver, even Jacques Pepin entertain us, but they don't teach us much cooking. And "Iron Chef"? That's just a neo-feudalistic game show that happens to involve food.
Nope, Leonard and I aren't much for food shows. It's the geeky cooking shows we devour in search of explanations, technique, equipment tests and, yes, entertainment: Food Network's gimmicky-in-a-good-way "Good Eats" (which sometimes runs as often as three times in one day) and PBS's consumer-reports show "America's Test Kitchen" (check local listings), which explain the science and engineering behind good food. Leonard got his awesome sweet potato recipe from "ATK's" "Thanksgiving III" episode, and I'm looking forward to finding out what menu items from its holiday dinner show -- as well as from "Good Eats" episodes on cookies, fudge, cake and cheesecake -- will end up on his table later this month.
Christopher Kimball, a wry, bow tie-bedecked New Englander, hosts "America's Test Kitchen," which brings to TV some of the findings of his Cook's Illustrated magazine. Like Consumer Reports, Cook's Illustrated takes no advertising, and the heart of this show is a no-nonsense quest for the best techniques and recipes. Cooks conduct experiments to get to the tastiest version of a dish, and you're treated to descriptions of those experiments and their results instead of the standard self-indulgent cooking-show patter. "ATK" also features taste tests of store-bought products, equipment and utensil tests, and (in some episodes) a science segment where ridiculous props explain, say, browning or the effects of capsaicin.
It's worth it to read a Cook's Illustrated, even if, like me, you seldom cook. The articles read as very accessible lab reports, with hypotheses, trials and errors, and conclusions (recipes). I find them much more useful than yet another three-recipe column that begins, "While staying in a small hotel in Tuscany ..." and extols the virtues of fresh, seasonal ingredients but doesn't teach any skills or methodology.
Each episode of "America's Test Kitchen" demonstrates how to achieve a Platonic form for two or three dishes and, for contrast, offers examples of bad food (tasteless, watery soups and Jello-like custards) to avoid. But Americans as a whole don't even know the difference, according to Kimball.
