Question
Michelle White
What are some common things that are difficult to master?
Answer
This really depends on the person and sort of their aptitude around certain things. But think about all of the cooking methods. Okay? These are very fundamental. Whether you're doing meat-based cookery or plant-based cookery or whatever your approach to cooking is, take a look at all the cooking methods and understand them. And understand them means to really drill down, to really put your nose up against that food on the grill, in the pan, in the oven, in that steamer, and run experiments across time and temperature, okay, to seek different results. And try to screw up your food, because that's where some of the greatest learning takes place, right, it's in the mistakes. Because then you start to understand where the borders are around proper cooking and how things change across that spectrum of adding too much heat versus too little heat, for example, or too much time versus too little time. You'll start to really understand how that food item acts and reacts in those environments. Cooking, at a very fundamental level, is only about controlling time and temperature. Okay? But it's difficult. It's a very simple concept, but it's very difficult. Even something as mundane as cooking a chicken breast. Okay, and I'll share a quick story. Just this past weekend, I was out at a Persian restaurant, and I ordered the chicken kebab. And it was nice pieces of chicken breast, probably four or five of them on a nice long skewer that came out. And son of a gun, if every one of them wasn't overcooked. On the surface, they looked very nice. They had been marinated. They were glistening with some oil and very succulent looking. But as soon as I cut into that piece of meat, and this was true of all of them on that skewer, the doneness varied a little bit across each piece, but generally speaking, it was dry, and it was stringy. And I've run into this at other places, too. I might get a chicken pho guy at a Vietnamese restaurant, and son of a gun, the chicken is overcooked. So it really takes some practice to do something as simple as sauté a chicken breast while maintaining maximum tenderness and moisture. And when you're doing these things, Michelle, also as you're experimenting with doneness levels, stray away a little bit from the recommended 165 degree Fahrenheit or 74 degrees Celsius doneness for chicken breast. Okay? That's sort of a guideline while we recommend it as a general safe approach, as recommended and enforced by the US Food and Drug Administration's Food Code, which is adopted by the food safety and sanitation departments in all the states across the United States anyway, and beyond. The focus there is the preservation of health, not necessarily optimizing the culinary outcome. Okay, so don't be afraid to stray away from that a little bit and maybe cook that chicken breast to 160 and see how you like the results. Cook it to 158 and see how you like the results. Okay? I don't necessarily recommend doing this in all situations where you're cooking for the public. But at home, as you have confidence and control over the way you handle your ingredients, then you can develop confidence around cooking your chicken to something less than 165, for example. But it's all about the experimentation, and you can really drill down on sautéing chicken breast, that one project, and that'll take you weeks or months. And then you can drill down on grilling chicken breast, and then you can drill down on baking chicken breast, and then you can move on to something else like chicken leg and thigh or a certain type of fish. Those are all difficult to master. Anyone can cook a chicken breast, but most people screw it up, frankly. Okay, so in order to really understand the nuances of time and temperature control, it takes a lot of repetition, a lot of deep engagement, and a lot of sincere practice. And so that's the challenge that I pose to you today, and I hope you'll run with it. All right?
