As I mentioned in the last post, I’ve started following a foodie YouTuber named Adam Ragusea, and he’s quickly become a favorite of mine because (ahem) he agrees with me on so many issues and so I trust him in other areas. There’s w-a-a-y too much conventional wisdom out there just waiting to be debunked, and he’s the man to do it. Here are three that I’ve especially liked to go along with the iodized-salt-is-bitter myth from last time:
MYTH #1: Let me start out with the misconception that I cited in my previous post: the ridiculous idea that home bakers should be measuring flour BY THE GRAM for yeasted breads. One of my favorite TV-show-based video channels, America’s Test Kitchen, really stresses this idea. They said in an episode about pita bread, for instance, that you should measure x number of grams for the water and flour, giving amounts for King Arthur brand bread flour. But if you were using another type of bread flour, they said, you should decrease the water by one ounce, as KAF has more protein than most other flours.
Wh-a-a-a-t? All other bread flours are exactly the same in relation to King Arthur? Ridiculous! Whatever happened to the other piece of conventional wisdom on this topic (which also happens to be true) that every batch of bread is different? Here’s what the peerless Adam had to say in his video about how to make bagels:
“I really believe in stirring in a baseline rough measurement and then just kneading in more by feel. Flour absorbs more or less water depending on its protein content, whether or not it’s been bleached, how it’s been milled, and I’m sure a million other factors. If you’re gonna follow a recipe to the gram like a robot you’d better hope that you’re using the exact same flour as the person who wrote it used. I’d rather just use my senses, knead in flour until it feels right.”
What often happens with these cooking myths is that a procedure that makes sense in a professional kitchen, perhaps a bakery or a restaurant, is just transferred willy-nilly to home cooking recipes. In a bakery, for example, the flour is going to be from one source. The kitchen itself is probably going to be air conditioned, without much in the way of outside air. (Think about all the shots you’ve seen of restaurant kitchens. Do they have any windows to the outdoors?) Huge batches of dough are going to be made. Kneading will be by machine. Shaping will be standardized. Proofing/rising will be in a controlled environment. Baking will be in commercial ovens, probably steam-injected. With all of those controls in place, and with the need for producing absolutely standard results, then of course weighing the ingredients would make sense. No one’s going to be kneading flour in by “feel.” It’s a totally different situation from that of a home cook, and this concept should be recognized.
Where measurement precision does make sense is in non-yeasted baked goods, especially anything that’s finely-textured such as a cake. In that case the overuse of flour will produce somewhat leaden results. So you should do what you can to prevent packing down your flour. Don’t dip your measuring cup into the flour and scoop it up. Instead, you can either weigh the flour if your recipe gives that measurement (and you can stand to do so) or (and this is what I do) you can lightly spoon the flour into your measuring cup and then level it off without packing it down. Any US recipe is going to give you volume measurements with perhaps the addition of weight measurements. Any British or European recipe is going to be written with weights; I always refuse to use those. (I do own a kitchen scale and I do use it, but just not for measuring recipe ingredients.) Adam points out that using a scale to measure large amounts such as flour and sugar isn’t really all that convenient despite the message we get to that effect in many recipes and cooking shows. But I’ll let him explain it all in the video below.
MYTH #2: You should always use unsalted butter for your cooking, with perhaps salted butter for table use.
The rationale here is that (assume affected teacher-y voice here) “if you use unsalted butter, you’re in charge of how much salt you add. If your butter is salted, then you don’t know how much extra salt is needed.” Because I’ve always resisted what I call “fiddly” things, I’ve never made a practice of keeping both types of butter on hand. (Jacques Pepin agrees with me, by the way.) I don’t like unsalted butter for use at meals, as I don’t think it has much taste. I always just use a little less salt in my recipes, and I have only one recipe in my cookbook (get your copy now by following the links on the sidebar) for which I suggest the use of unsalted butter. The peerless Adam (TPA) says that most of this salted/unsalted butter bushwa dates back to the time when butter was much more heavily salted than it is now because it couldn’t be refrigerated and the salt acted as a preservative. So there!
And one more, perhaps my favorite just because this is what I always do but I’ve felt a little guilty about it:
MYTH #3: It’s a shame and a scandal to break your pasta in order to get it to fit into the pot of boiling water. You’re supposed to take your unbroken spaghetti or linguini or cappellini or whatever–the long, thin type of pasta–and put as much down into the water as you can, and then as it softens you push it down until the whole bunch is submerged. I always just break mine in half so I can plop it in all at once, but then I don’t have one drop of Italian blood in my veins, so what do I know? TPA, on the other hand, is descended from Italian immigrants and always breaks his pasta to get it into the pot, as does his father. So there! It’s easier. What possible difference could it possibly make? And you probably end up with more evenly-cooked pasta with the breaking-in-half method since you can get it all into the boiling water at the same time. You can imagine how this little “rule” came about, since a big, deep pasta pot (such as they’d have in a professional kitchen or in a home kitchen where pasta is being cooked often for many people) would allow you to get in the unbroken pasta all at once. And that fact morphed into a “rule.” (And I also cut my pasta with a fork instead of twirling it when I eat it. So shoot me!) I don’t use long thin pasta for the most part anyway, BTW. I like thick, sturdy shapes such as penne or those darling little bowties. Guess what? You don’t have to break it or twirl it. So much easier!
And with that I’ll quit ranting–for now. Let’s all quit being intimidated, shall we? Do things the way they work for you!
This isn’t the bagel video that I mentioned above but an entire episode in which TPA talks about why he thinks volume measurements in general make more sense than weight measurements:
And here’s the butter episode:
I’m not posting a video on the pasta-breaking, since there are many brief mentions of it in TPA’s videos as a whole. (You should subscribe to his YouTube channel, by the way.)