Food

Cooking and the curious stories food carries with it.

Cooking

Chef Fatty (Website) — Seattle cook Charles on weeknight Asian cooking — 175 recipes he's tested himself, written on the principle that a recipe should explain its own mechanism rather than just list steps.

• Recipes (Reference) — the full index, sorted by noodles, rice, chicken, beef, pork, seafood, and sides.
• The Wok Buying Guide (Article) — what a wok is actually built to do, and why a $17 carbon steel one is the same steel as a $189 one.
• The Stir-Fry Sauce Formula (Article) — stir-fry sauce as four dials (salt, sweet, acid, aromatic) you learn to turn, instead of one recipe you follow.
• Pork Chop Temperature (Article) — why 145°F beats the 160°F everyone was taught, and why pink pork stopped being dangerous.

• Food Chemistry Basics: What Are Emulsifiers? (Article) — why oil and water stop separating once an emulsifier is present: the molecule has a hydrophilic end and a hydrophobic one, so it sits on the interface and surrounds each droplet, preventing the droplets from merging back together. Covers choosing one by HLB value and by which way round the emulsion runs (water-in-oil or oil-in-water), with the everyday cases — lecithin in egg yolk holding a mayonnaise, lecithin in chocolate improving its flow, emulsifiers in ice cream for freeze-thaw stability.

Reference

• FoodSubs (Reference) — a cooking encyclopedia of thousands of ingredients and kitchen tools across 17 groups (733 flavourings, 260 dairy entries, 161 pieces of equipment), each with pictures, synonyms, pronunciation, and substitutions given as a ratio — a teaspoon of Tabasco for an ounce of adobo sauce.

Dishes & histories

• Moo shu pork (Article) — the northern-Chinese stir-fry whose name poetically renames its scrambled egg “sweet osmanthus blossoms,” dodging a taboo on the word “egg” during Confucian death-anniversary rites.
• Cut of beef (Article) — how a carcass is broken into primal cuts and then subdivided, and how little the countries agree on the result: “brisket” is a different piece of the animal in the US and the UK, Brazil sells numbered cuts like alcatra, and Italy names subcuts anatomically. The rule underneath all the schemes is that meat grows more tender the further it sits from hoof and horn — which is why the hardest-working leg and neck muscles are the toughest and the cheapest.
• List of steak dishes (Article) — an index of steak preparations well past the obvious: carpetbag steak, a working-class dish from Mumbles in which the steak is stuffed with oysters; steak tartare, finely chopped and served raw; London broil, marinated flank broiled and then sliced across the grain; twice cooked pork, the Sichuan method of simmering pork belly steaks with spices, chilling and slicing them, then shallow-frying the slices in a wok. Fish, pork, and vegetarian steaks (portobello, tofu) get their own sections, as do the sauces.

Reading

• Gastronomica (Website) — UC Press’s quarterly “Journal for Food Studies,” with peer-reviewed essays treating food as a lens on culture, history, labour, and politics, from wine microbiomes to cultivated meat.