Weights, Volumes, and Balanced Scales

 

Recipes come in all sorts of forms and flavors. Some start with longform anecdotes you don't want to read, some have history lessons or ingredient sourcing instructions, and a lot of them just suck.

That suck can be for a variety of reasons, but the most common is the measurements. Cups, spoons, sifting, leveling, liquid, powder, solid, crumble... it doesn't matter what it is, it's not going to be consistent unless you're weighing it, and I absolutely hate that, which is why I almost always prefer using weighted measurements and scales. 

But what do you do if the recipe doesn't have them? What if it never did? A whole lot of recipes tend to lean vague- sometimes by accident, other times by design. 

An old cookbook from medieval France might have 'Two pounds flour' in a bread roll formula. Easy enough, right? Until you realize that at the time, a French pound was twelve ounces rather than sixteen. Oops!

So here- some quick volume to weight conversions that won't screw up home kitchen recipes.

    1 cup All-purpose Flour should be 140g, and Whole Wheat Flour nearer 150g
    1 cup of Self-Rising Flour will be a hint less than 140g, and Bread Flour 145g
    1 cup Granulated Sugar is a flat 200g, and most non-clumped Brown Sugar is more like 190g
    1 cup of Tapioca Starch? 135g (my developed recipe for Pão de Queijo uses 200g, or ~1.5 cups)

Many historical cookbooks take for granted the common culinary lexicon of the period in which they were published due to space and expense concerns, as well. 

I recall a recipe in the Fannie Farmer Cookbook for risolles, which are essentially samosa or ravioli, made with puff pastry in lieu of standard dough, then deep-fried.

The first step in the recipe? "Make Puff Paste". Because, of course, everyone reading the recipe already knows what it is and how to make it...

These are the struggles of the recipe writer. To take the temporary and turn it into a timeless treasure through the written word. Don't be afraid to look at a recipe and wonder if something's not right, and don't be shy about taking notes and making edits for the next time around. Every time you fix something, the next person to use it will be grateful, whether you're around to hear it or not.

Unsafe and Unnecessary Information

 

With the massive expansion in internet availability around the world, the potential for easy access to information has never been higher. 

Unfortunately, the world is full of people who don't care about accuracy, only marketability, and the modern internet centers around that fundamental design flaw (and the accompanying character flaws responsible).

Accurate information tends to be static. It's sometimes utilitarian, even boring. It comes from verifiable professionals, often with accompanying references. 

That's not how the internet works right now, which is a terrible problem. Such a measured, deliberate approach not only fights with the current rapid-fire "content creation" meta, but also with the visibility and accessibility algorithms behind the websites themselves.

Under the hood, the modern internet is sabotaging itself for the sake of short term offscreen profits, maximizing its ability to farm search information, then harvest and sell potentially useful data to other corporations and governments that are willing and able to pay. It's like a futures market- so all parties know it's nonsense but they play along anyway!

When it comes to most things food-related online, aids like the Jump To Recipe browser plugin are almost mandatory, since brief documents with lower word count (as opposed to, say, short videos) get reduced priority in search engines, rendering them less effectively found. What would otherwise be a quick and easy lookup feels like it's been hamstrung from both sides, padded out to the point of aggravation with longform anecdotes and ersatz prose just to reach a level of search priority it was obliged to from the start. 

To a person in a hurry looking for a weeknight dinner notion, it feels like a profound betrayal to find a 'recipe' webpage that then requires navigating past a handful of ads, sponsorships, and an often unreadably obtuse wall of vaguely related text to find a 'recipe' that might turn out to be a poorly formatted mess ill-suited for the purpose. There is little worse than wasted time.

The internet was developed to speed up information sharing, after all. 

Anyone else still remember the old term "The Information Superhighway"?

Doesn't exist any more. Now useful things are buried in piles of catchy but forgettable junk. We've got lasting horrors like NyQuil Chicken, or the uniquely Chicagoan Malört Sausage. Does anyone remember the memetic horror Tide Pod Pizza? Things like that are/were popular. Imagine the horrors you might have missed!

I keep my personal online presence to a relative minimum. I've talked about it before, even. The more of something there is, the less likely any of it is going to be adequately organized, curated, and useful to those who might seek it out.

Just because it can exist doesn't mean it should, and just because it exists doesn't mean it deserves to be seen. Reckless promotion of unverified information kills people. Hasn't that been obvious enough these past few years?

Unfortunate that this morning showed clearly how sufficiently large companies are willing to cover for one another at the macro level when it comes to misinformation. The sorts of problems these situations create can't be solved with just money. When it looks okay for the big guy, the little one imitates, and the whole environment suffers.

But I suppose if given enough money, one can buy sufficient peace and quiet for the rest of one's days... minus occasional grumblings from a vestigial conscience.

Education

 

It's important. Above perhaps anything else. It comes from all sorts of people, places, and concepts, but only means one thing- improvement. 

A goodly number of people might say 'growth', a regrettably common and unfortunate association. Growth is a largely negative side effect of any successful enterprise, and something to be ameliorated rather than encouraged. This applies to almost everything in mainstream society, but is aggressively ignored by the incompletely developed, the ethically bankrupt, the rich, the many world governments, and the corporations that own them. 

That's another issue I've the solution for, but that'll be here some other day.

My mother was a teacher for her entire career- I learned how to read by digging in her boxes of mimeographs, written notes, techniques, and research. Before even fully grasping what the notions meant, they laid a foundation for what to do and how to do it, and it stuck. Understanding how to do something is as important as recognizing who can do it if I can't, since to properly teach, one must first learn. 

I've learned one hell of a lot. Frankly, I have the Marco Polo Problem- if I told you more than half of the things I've seen, done, endured, and learned from... you likely wouldn't believe me.

That's where the problem arises. People have a tendency not to trust competence and expertise unless it's noisy.

To a degree, it's my own fault. Part of what makes me so valuable is my willingness to be and stay invisible while I work to improve. But that in itself prevents most people from taking my measure, and in turn prepares them to doubt.

 Irony, given the loudest voices tend to be those least worthy of being heard.

Marinade Miscellany (and homemade Jerk Paste)

 

What's a marinade? Broadly, a suspension of several liquids and solids designed for multiple purposes and to have multiple effects on food.

What's in a marinade? 4 obligatory components: Oil, Acid, Seasoning, and Flavoring. Quantities and specifics are left up to the creator, enabling enormous versatility.

What do you do with it? So long as you know what they always do, anything else you like!

1. The Oil: It can also be for flavor, but its primary purpose is to ensure the marinade makes better and more uniform contact with every available surface- a transfer medium.
2. The Acid: It is also significantly for flavor, but functions as a tenderizer for proteins. It can be used to ensure superior texture in tough cuts of meat, but also risks the denaturing of it if immersed too long or in too potent an intensity. A deliberate example of the last can be readily found in ceviche, wherein acids are used to 'cook' fish in lieu of heat application.
3. The Seasoning: Simply salt, and for some people pepper. A flavor enhancer and water extractor, salt amplifies the effects of all the other components. Strictly speaking, there are sufficient pseudo-salts that granulated isn't always necessary, but a neutral salt never hurts for balance.
4. The Flavoring: That's everything else. Give your dish what it needs to take it where you want to go!

The marinating process can be fast or slow, depending on the ingredients and intended target. To help contextualize, marinades are for more than meat- almost all salad dressings qualify as marinades as well. Since more delicate items like greens don't leave much time for them to work, they tend to be very potent in flavor. 

There are plenty of interesting ways to adjust marinades for your needs and desires, but one of the most common for me is finding a way to use the marinade to avoid waste. Often, it'd be as part of a cooking liquid for the marinated item, or cooked into a sauce for it.

While marinades tend to be mostly water-based liquids, the quantity of flavorings can be used to change the physical structure of it too, as I'll show in this example below: 

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This is my baseline recipe for Jamaican Jerk Paste. It's thin enough to use as a marinade, and thick enough that you can leave it on when cooking. It's not blazing hot spice wise, but you can adjust your chile type and quantity for your own preferences.

• 2 bunches Cilantro (stems and all)
• 6 Garlic cloves, 5 Scallions (all but the roots)
• 2 Serrano Chiles, stemmed and seeded
• 1/4 cup each neutral oil and vinegar (I use rice vinegar; distilled white vinegar is more common)
• 4 teaspoons Allspice, finely ground.

Coarsely chop all plant solids, season very lightly with salt to cause water leech.
Combine all ingredients and blend till emulsified. Taste and season- be aggressive.
Cover and allow to ferment at room temperature for 24 hours before using or refrigerating.

Jerk away~

Chicken thighs and drumsticks, marinated for 24 hours, roasted at 425F / 220C for 20-25 minutes, then carefully finished under the broiler for a little color and evaporation. Delicious.