The elements of taste
Identifies and describes the fourteen elements of taste, and features 130 recipes, each with comments on how they were created.
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33% recommend67% neutral
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What Hacker News says
- I'll strongly second the Cook's Illustrated recommendation. If you want to know the reasons behind the recipes, there's no better place to start. I've used things I've learned from their articles many, many times to help with other recipes.
And here's some books that spend at least as much time talking about how to cook as they do giving lists of ingredients.
_The Zuni Cafe Cookbook_ by Judy Rodgers
_Cooking by Hand_ by Paul Bertolli
The French Laundry book by Thomas Keller is worth a read.
If you're into charcuterie, someone else mentioned Michael Ruhlman; his book _Charcuterie_ with chef Bryan Polcyn is excellent. _The River Cottage Meat Cookbook_ is also good.
If you want to go deep into ingredients, _The Elements of Taste_ by Gray Kunz and Peter Kaminsky (and _The Flavor Bible_ by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenberg (I haven't personally read that one all the way through, though)).
And you can always just pick up a culinary school textbook.
- This thread looks MUCH better informed on BBQ than the OP.
"Collagen," that is, melting it -- from all I could tell, yup -- that's the true secret to cooking a wide range of meats.
Yup, from the investigations I did on the Internet, the secret number is 160 F; first cut, for just one number, that's the temperature at which collagen melts.
The next secret is that the muscle fibers are always tender. That is, if meat is tough, the cause is that the collagen has not yet been melted out.
Next secret is, if get the muscle fibers much over 160 F for too long, then the proteins change, expel their water, and become dry and brittle. No additional cooking will fix that. You have ruined meat.
For years I read dreamy recipes from the NYT, Julia Child, Jacques Pepin, etc. about delicious, lovable, traditional beef stew from France, Italy, etc., please the family, the neighbors, guests, have a great dish for pot luck dinners, have everyone in the family gathering around with family bonding, etc., and tried and tried and tried, with lots of garlic, onions, carrots, beef stock, red wine, etc., everything done more carefully than I worked in college chemistry lab, and the results were always disaster. Always. That went on off and on for years. Lots of wasted time, money, effort, and groceries, and lots of ruined meat.
Why? Never, not once, ever, did any of those dreamy sources mention meat temperature. Not once. With iron determination, feet locked deep in reinforced concrete, the authors, apparently on penalty of slow torture or being stewed themselves, ever, Ever, EVER let themselves mention meat temperature of 160 F and melting collagen.
From those years of frustration and failure, I still resent what the NYT, Child, Pepin wrote. I'm no longer explosively mad, boiling oil mad, or just boiling mad, but I'm still simmering. This thread alone is MUCH better. So, we're talking (A) the highly self-esteemed NYT and some high end book publishing houses and (B) some largely anonymous HN readers. And, may I have the envelope please? And the winner, by huge margins, on all points, is HN!
Finally I learned on the Internet from some sites with some people quite serious about good BBQ. Gee, they were serious enough to use thermometers! In the meat itself, not just the hot air under some metal dome 16 inches above the meat, not just the wall of the oven! And they fully understood melting collagen!
The writers were famous? Nope. Well informed? YUP!
But, now the NYT has improved, right?
Let's see: The OP has some thing about 135 F for many hours. Hmm .... Last I heard, we want 145+ F for food safety. Uh, I'd suggest, that stuff that was at 135 F for some hours, try to take the family yacht about 200 miles east of Boston, weight the stuff down with lead, and, in the dark, without the EPA around, drop it overboard. Hope it doesn't kill off the worms three miles down. Uh, maybe wrap that meat with a copy of the NYT?
Generally, my opinion about the NYT and the cookbook publishers is that they are interested in vicarious escapist fantasy emotional experience entertainment (VEFEEE) with little connection with reality, facts, times, temperatures, weights, volumes, pH, information, instruction, or actual good cooking results. E.g., for decades they wouldn't tell me about 160 F and collagen, and now they are saying something about 135 F. Did I hear that the NYT is going out of business? Maybe I heard some such thing.
But, I know; I know; the OP is fine if want to imagine a really great backyard party, with 20 guests, some A-listers, a couple of Ferrari cars on the grass, lots of good beer, heck, Chardonnay, pass around a football, some hoops, etc. That's all on the porch of a Manhattan high rise apartment building?
Suggestion: NYT people, if you want good BBQ, order carryout! Or, gee, even have some via FedEx from Memphis!
Next, we might consider Maillard browning? And especially for ribs, smoke rings?
BBQ is good, not just a little good but really good. Fancy? No. Good? Darned right. Why? As in
Gray Kunz and Peter Kaminsky, The Elements of Taste, ISBN 0-316-60874-2, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 2001.
BBQ hits hard on all of sweet, sour, salty, hot (as in pepper), and onion and garlic.
I apologize here because due to working on my startup I'm temporarily out of cooking for a hobby. I hope to return. Everything I posted here is from years ago. But, when I return I will have this thread as additional information!
- Right away I can think of three reasons you thought that you had "really good food":
(1) You've never been to Memphis!
(2) BBQ is so good that even done poorly, it's darned good.
(3) Actually (secret, don't tell the others) BBQ, at least the Memphis kind that I know, is not very difficult to do well!
Why is it so good? Well, it's warm, soft, and moist (succulent) and is big on salt, black and/or hot red pepper, sweet, sour, fat, smoke, and the Malliard reaction. So, it hits really hard on nearly all the elements as in:
Gray Kunz and Peter Kaminsky, 'The Elements of Taste'.
For the secret, one of the pillars has been explained by some food chemistry -- keep the proteins in the meat fibers below 185 F. Do most of the cooking with the meat at about 160 F for melting the collagen. Then you do have food safety.
Overheat the meat fibers with the proteins, and they will shrink, get rid of their water, and become not good.
The long cooking times at relatively low temperatures are to melt the collagen without overheating and, thus, ruining the proteins. Supposedly the proteins are always tender; only the collagen is tough. So, melt out the collagen without ruining the proteins. The melted collagen helps make the meat moist and succulent.
I don't know about beef brisket BBQ -- it's a Texas thing. I was in Texas only once, did have some of their beef BBQ, and it was good. But I don't know how they do it. On that trip to Texas, the story went that some early immigrants were German butchers, and they worked out how to BBQ brisket, no doubt, as a way to have people able to like that cut of meat.
For ribs, which I also don't know about, maybe the smoke plays a really important role, e.g., for a smoke ring.
But for Memphis BBQ, picnic pork shoulder, I long suspected that all the smoke was mostly just advertising smoke to attract downwind customers and, really, not very important to the final meat as served. One reason is that about half the shoulder was still covered by the skin. Another reason was that for the rest of the meat, the ratio of surface area exposed to the smoke to meat volume was relatively small.
Another big secret (definitely don't tell anyone this one!): Actually, get a good oven thermometer and carefully adjust your oven to hold about 220 F. Not much higher than 220 F and maybe a little lower (don't want the meat to get over 185 F).
Get a roasting pan and a roasting rack. Put a picnic pork shoulder, say, skin side down, on the rack, with a dry rub on the exposed meat surface if you want, although I doubt that it will contribute to the final product as served, place it in the oven with a meat thermometer deep in the meat but not next to a bone (that might give a misleading reading).
Cook to an internal temperature of 185 F, maybe a little less, not much more, for maybe 16 hours.
Will get a lot of fat and melted collagen in the bottom of the roasting pan.
Place on a cutting board, remove the skin, remove the meat from the bones (the arm bone and the shoulder joint), remove as much fat as you wish, and coarsely chop the rest.
Add favorite red BBQ sauce, likely one with smoke flavor.
Place, likely with some salt and hot sauce, on a white bread bun and top with a simple white coleslaw.
It's good.
Refrigerate what's left; it reheats well in a microwave oven.
For the coleslaw, my quick guess at what Memphis has been doing is to take a head of ordinary green cabbage, quarter it by cutting through the root, and cut out the solid, stiff stem parts. Thinly slice the rest. Add ordinary Ranch dressing and mix. Done.
Last time I bought about 9 pounds of cabbage and used 127 ounces of shredded cabbage and 13.2 cups of dressing. Might cut that back to, say, 12 cups. Got eight quarts.
No doubt Memphis was not using Ranch dressing, but with my guess the results are not too far off. I got the Ranch dressing idea from the back of a package of shredded cabbage for coleslaw.
So, here I've described hated ersatz oven-Q. It's also surprisingly good.
For doing BBQ, picnic pork shoulder is forgiving, from all I've seen much easier than beef or chicken. Should get good results if even roughly follow what I outlined. Even with pork, the shoulder is likely much more forgiving than ribs.
I have no desire to return to Memphis!
If my business does well and I retire, I want to go to, say, New Hampshire, enjoy challenging the winters with a 4 wheel drive car with a lot of road clearance and big, aggressive snow tires, attend operas, concerts, and lectures on mathematical physics in Boston, feast on New England seafood and maybe French, Italian, German, and Chinese food, and, maybe, sometimes BBQ a pork shoulder!
Memphis? Naw.
For the business, as of yesterday, I got all the planned software running. That was a good day. I have a few revisions in mind and then on to my critical review, alpha and beta test, version 1.0, and going live!
