Why cheap restaurant specials should be avoided.   Permalink

June 21st, 2012

The average restaurant food cost in North America about 30-35%. For a 3-course prix fixe meal at $15, you’re likely getting around $5 worth of food at wholesale prices. An entire meal could be made of food that costs only slightly more than a venti latte at Starbucks. Are you still sure you want to eat it?

It’s berry season again.   Permalink

June 21st, 2012

Keep them from quickly spoiling by using science.

Busting A Myth: Good cookware only has riveted handles   Permalink

June 20th, 2012

When you work in a professional kitchen, you get to learn what kitchen equipment can stand the test and what can’t. This is one I know that’s a load of horse hockey.

Myth: Riveted handles mean good quality cookware and welded handles do not.

In our minds, rivets mean strength. Jeans, I-beams and suits of armour are riveted after all!

The problem with rivets in cookware is that those rivets are usually a low-carbon steel and not as strong as the metal in the handle or pot/pan base. In the manufacturing process, hot single-ended rivets are passed through holes in the body and handle, and then the shank is punched or pressed (technically, it’s called “peening”) to flatten and shape the second shank in order to adhere the handle to the pot. Over time, because that metal is softer than the handle or base, it can stretch, causing the handle to become loose. It can even break.

The change of surface shape and metal on the inside of a pot may also cause uneven temperatures in the area around the rivet, creating cool spots within the cookware.

Rivets are also a bone of contention with some cooks over food safety. Because the interior surface of a riveted pot is not smooth, food particles can become trapped around and just under the edges of the rivet. After the pot has been “cleaned” and put away, that’s when those food particles begin to spoil or attract bacteria.

If the rivets start to stretch, food can then make its way under the whole rivet and into the drilled channel. Water trapped under a tight rivet can also worsen the problem. As that water heats up, it expands and creates steam. That steam will push hard on anything its next to in order to complete its expansion.

Why are welds healthier?

Welds are generally made on the outside surface of the pot/pan, leaving a pristine interior surface that can be cleaned easily. The pot part is, in effect, part of the handle, and vice versa.

So how did this come to be?

For decades, rivets were associated with cheap cookware. As any good metallurgist or engineer will tell you, a good weld is stronger than a rivet will ever be. But welding means skilled-trade, unionized workers, and a certain level of skill required to get a good welded joint. This means higher costs and thus was usually not used on cheap cookware, while riveted—or worse yet screwed on—handles were found on cheaper products.

Somewhere in the past two decades the lines got crossed. Many (and by that I mean most) of the high-end kitchen brands of the past (Le Creuset, Calphalon, KitchenAid, Cuisinart, etc.) began to parlay their prestige into lower-end markets. This is why you can find Calphalon products at Target, and KitchenAid at Walmart. In doing so, they needed to have products that cost less to make. For cookware, that means rivets. And because those names are still associated with their high-end pasts, we assume that rivets must also be a high-end feature.

Unfortunately this change in mindset means that customers are now looking for riveted cookware at all price points, making the ubiquity of rivets a great slap in the face of quality and food safety. That’s not to say the pots themselves aren’t good, but that riveted joints are antithetical to the high-end nature and safety of these pots and pans.

In short, it’s another false idea that’s kinda short changing us. My goal is to get people thinking about their food and the products they use to make it, but food industries have a long history of false claims and trying to sell us more and more products.

My favourite welded handle cookware line? “Pots for Eternity” A.K.A. the Classic Line from Paderno. They’re excellent quality, built in Canada and they regularly go on deep discount sale. They also thankfully don’t have glass lids, but that’s for a whole other post.

One instance where progress has gotten us less   Permalink

June 20th, 2012

There was a time when it wasn’t uncommon to see kitchen ranges with two ovens, and a deep fryer and/or pressure cooker built in.

Pies, glorious pies   Permalink

June 20th, 2012

Looks like despite two years of claiming pies (a personal favourite) would overtake cupcakes as the latest dessert trend, it’s finally happening.

Get rid of your glass pot lids.   Permalink

June 19th, 2012

Gah! I hate them!

They seem remarkably handy because you can see through them, but they are an enemy to be destroyed.

Take a look at your glass pot lid. Notice it has a little metal ring in it, with a hole or valve through the center? The reason that hole is there is not because there’s a nascent piercing trend in cookware. No, it’s there for a bad reason. Marketing will tell you that it allows some pressure to be relieved and thus reducing rattling of the lid. That is true. It isn’t however the reason that only glass (and not metal) lids have this feature. It’s there to give the glass some protection from thermal shock and stresses.

In other words, it’s allowing heat and steam to escape and has a negative effect on the cooking of your food. Wonderful, huh? Want to know the hows and whys?

Glass is a better thermal insulator than steel. In that, it is better at keeping heat inside (our outside) of something. But because that hole is required, it’s like leaving a window open in mid winter in a well-insulated house. It’s counter intuitive, slows down your cooking and creates uneven temperatures within a lidded pot.

This makes stovetop cooking and steaming of food, or lidding a pot off the heat far less efficient. In fact, it kind of defies the purpose, donchathink?

By far, the worst offenders are dutch ovens with glass lids.

As an aside to fill you with a little shame, one credible story says the “Dutch” in “dutch oven” comes from an old ethnic slur against the Netherlanders meaning “fake” or “cheap”, i.e.; “going Dutch”. In Europe, they’re generally referred to as casseroles or cocottes. If you own a dutch oven, I bet you feel a little dirty now, don’t you?

The dutch oven was designed that its lid was generally heavy and very heat conductive, so that when put into a wood or brick oven or hung over a fire, would cook its contents from all sides. Oftentimes, hot coals would be placed on the lid of a dutch oven to facilitate heating, which is why several brands like Staub and many models of Lodge have a lipped lid. In other words, it acted as an oven within a larger oven. Heavy cast iron or enamelled cast iron dutch ovens are preferred because they have a high thermal retention and inertia. Because of its heavy, tight fitting lid, a small amount of steam pressure will build up inside, keeping things moist as well as increasing the thermal conductivity of the air trapped in the vessel itself. Consider it a very very low PSI pressure cooker.

With glass being a great insulator, the advantage of cooking from all sides when in an oven goes straight out the window, and the vented lid does nothing to keep that small amount of pressure in. If your oven is able to use both upper and lower elements at the same time, it’s even more of a waste, as much of that thermal energy from above would be spent trying to heat the glass, rather than being passed into the dutch oven.

The moral of the story: When buying kitchen gear, always remember that physics wins out over “convenient features”. Glass lids seem like a smart idea, but they give a false sense of security and take away many of the advantages of lids were created for.

And seriously, once splattering and critical mass of condensation is taken into consideration, exactly how much can you see through those glass lids anyway?

Four random things you should know   Permalink

June 15th, 2012

1. A lot of food is poisonous.
If you’ve always wanted a *real* excuse to avoid eating fruit and vegetables, here it is. You know Oxalic acid, that compound that makes rhubarb leaves poisonous? In high concentrations, it can create painful kidney stones and leach calcium from your body. In rare occurrences, it can be fatal. Well, it turns out it appears in quite a foods.

What foods? Stuff we don’t eat in North America, right? Like poi, or insects, or guinea pigs? Well, no. It’s in broccoli, cabbage, sweet potato, peanuts, apples, beans, carrots, spinach, chocolate, kiwi fruit, tea leaves and the list goes on.

We aren’t all dead yet, so what’s up?

Heat. Most of the foods high in oxalic acid are generally cooked before we eat them. It turns out that the sheer act of heating oxalic acid-rich foods is enough to neutralize most of the acid itself.

Other nutrients in foods can also neutralize or block absorption of oxalic acid. As acids want to bond with minerals to form salts, foods higher in less toxic acids (like citric, malic or tartaric acids), end up competing for minerals and lessening their availability to oxalic acid.

The nutritional value more than outweighs the potential risk from OA, but that said, too much raw food high in oxalic acid (like, most of a crudite platter) can cause gastrointestinal upset. Over the long term, it has the potential to do worse.

2. Wine should never be stored flat.
Wait a minute! Haven’t we always been told to store wine on its side?

Yes, we have. And it’s wrong.

Oxygen is wine’s worst nightmare. It can make a good glass of wine taste flat and metallic in mere hours. Which is why unopened bottles thankfully have little oxygen in them. And what is there is controlled and just enough to add certain flavour characteristics over longer periods of time with proper storage. But that little amount of oxygen can have different effects based on how a full bottle of wine is stored. To give you an example, I’ve created a little graphic.

Wine Bottle Oxygen Graphic

With blue representing surface area exposed to oxygen you can see that a full bottle (fig.1) has very little of the wine’s surface area exposed to air. This is the optimal position for any wine with a screw-top. A full bottle laying flat (fig.2) has the same amount of oxygen in it, but that oxygen has been flattened out and now in contact with a greater surface area of the wine. While fig.2 has a cork exposed to moisture, keeping more oxygen from entering into the bottle by keeping the cork swollen within the neck, it’s allowing a far greater amount of the current oxygen in the bottle in contact with wine. This could lead to premature aging and a less than optimal product, especially if you’re hoping to age a decent Bordeaux for a decade or so.

A full bottle with a tilt of around 30° (fig.3) has again the same amount of air and is keeping the cork moist, but because of the tilt, a far smaller amount of oxygen is touching wine. This is the optimal position for a cork-sealed wine, and easily achievable at home through placement of a rolled up kitchen towel under the bottom end. The closer you are to a 45° angle, the less oxygen will touch your wine.

So, your best bet for storing opened wines? Don’t. Finish that bottle off. If you can’t do that, store it upright (fig. 4) or decant the wine into a smaller, screw-top bottle. Keeping a few spare demi-bottles around is good for those times. Just as long as the container is glass and it can be filled nearly to the lip, you’ll get more life out of that wine.

3. Keep your oils in the fridge.
Or better yet, a wine fridge.

That expensive extra virgin olive oil you bought last week will lose its pepperiness and green flavour the more its exposed to heat and light. Not only that, but oils high in polyunsaturated fats can go rancid at even the cooler side of room temperature. This lists includes olive oil, soybean, canola, peanut, nut oils and basically just about every liquid cooking oil commonly used.

Aside from flavour and texture, we cook with oils because they are an incredibly good medium for heat transfer; that is they allow heat to move through them really well. This allows them to heat up remarkably fast when put in a hot pan, and foods coated with oil will cook faster and more evenly. But that also means that any heat in the surrounding atmosphere will transfer to the oil within a container just as easily.

Olive oil can thicken and go cloudy when cold. This is a natural effect of its monounsaturated fats solidifying below about 10°C (50°F). It does not however, harm the oil’s texture or flavour. Simply removing the oil from the fridge for a few minutes before use will return it to its more recognizable state.

Cold olive oil in a bottle

Olive oil below 10°C (50°F) looks like this.

A wine fridge is a perfect environment for cooking oils. It’s cold, but not as cold as a regular refrigerator. If you store oils at the same 12-15°C (54-59°F) temperature used for red wines, your oil will be better preserved and relatively protected from light, but won’t be cold enough to turn monounsaturated fats solid. In lieu of a wine fridge, store oils on the top shelf of your fridge door.

But you want it to be handy, right? Buy some opaque squeeze bottles with caps/close tops (like these kitschy condiment bottles), fill them 3/4 of the oils you use the most and keep them in a cool place in your pantry.

4. Store bought bread crumbs suck.
These breadcrumbs are the bakery equivalent of sawdust. When wood is being sawn and milled, a vast amount of sawdust is created in the process. Similar things happen in a bakery; bread just loves to drop crumbs, whenever possible. Those crumbs get collected and packaged for resale. Might as well make a buck on something that would’ve just been thrown away, right?

Most of the time, it can contain a mixture of different types of bread, including a proportion of brown and high-fat breads. They end up having a muddled flavour and are so small they act more like sand than anything else. Natural and added fats in some types of bread can lead to a softer texture and inability to become crunchy. That they’re made of pre-browned bread is also a disappointment, as most of the naturally wonderful aromas of maillard and browning reactions are lost on the factory floor.

The solution?

“Mie de pain” (middle of the bread), as the french call it. Essentially, it’s white or “fresh” bread crumbs. Crusts are taken off slices of bread, and the resulting white is chopped fine or rough chopped and then processed in a food processor until rough crumbs.

Mie de Pain on a cutting board

Fresh Mie de Pain.

The results are dramatic. Mie de Pain ends up being quite similar to Panko, very crunchy with a more bread-like flavour. The relatively low fat content means also they dry out more crisp and crunchy. You’ll also get those wonderful aromas of baking bread, adding another component to any baked or fried items.

A loaf of plain white bread costs about the same as a container of breadcrumbs, but you will get a higher yield and better product from mie de pain. They can be put in a low oven and dried out for pantry storage, but best results come from simply freezing them in an airtight container in a non-evil freezer. [1. defrosting (AKA “frost-free”) freezers are the worst thing to happen to food. The constant freeze-thaw causes moisture to evaporate from the surface of any food that is not vacuum sealed; this is what’s called “Freezer Burn”. Additionally, the thawing ends up promoting the growth of microbes, as the temperature of the freezer needs to move above 0°C (32°F) in order to melt any ice. It does so by using a heater. Yes, a heater. In your freezer. This is why defrosting freezers are evil and only good for ice cubes. Maybe.]

Why a Food Blog?   Permalink

June 13th, 2012

I have a deep passion for food, as well as sharing the things I do and think. I’m not new to blogging, having posting regularly to a LiveJournal for almost 10 years. I loved writing so frequently, but after a series of bad breakups, I grew uncomfortable with putting up so much of my personal life for public display.

A blog about food seemed a natural fit, but it wasn’t until 2011 that I began to seriously contemplate starting one. Serious in that I began writing a custom content management system for the blog. But, to have the functionality and features I wanted became a huge project in its own right. It was a catch 22. I wanted to write, but couldn’t because the site wasn’t finished. And because the site wasn’t finished, it was slowly taking away my desire to write. It wasn’t until May of 2012 that I said to hell with it, scrapped the code I had and put a WordPress install on my web host.

I still needed to design the site itself. Because I love Jon Gruber’s sense of simplicity, it’s loosely based off of Daring Fireball. It’s a simple, uncluttered design. There are no blogrolls, share buttons, calendar, categories, ads or anything else. Though I do reserve the right to someday place unassuming ads. But for now, what you see is what you read; no chaff on this wheat.

I’m not entirely sure what direction this site will eventually face. For now, I’m just throwing ideas against the wall and seeing what sticks and what drives my passion further. So sit back and enjoy the ride.

The long but intriguing story of how I got here.   Permalink

June 13th, 2012

Who am I?

Ignoring any philosophical discussions, I should write you a description of the person running this blog. Allow me to quote in the most cheesy of ways from Ratatouille: “I am a cook!”

I’m also a graphic designer. I’m a father to be; I’m a total nerd fanboy over science; I’m practical; I’m unashamedly realistic about some things and head-in-the-clouds about others.

But you’re not here for me, are you? No, you’re probably here because—like me—you love food.

My past hasn’t always reflected that love. For over a decade, I worked as a self-taught graphic designer; mainly because it was the only way I felt I could parlay my artistic abilities without sketching commissioned drawings of dear departed family pets, or something else just as soul sucking. It allowed me to work on art behind a computer, where my “it’s-never-good-enough”-brain could hit command-z rather than go insane trying to erase to perfection.

Twelve years go by… Pretend you’re imagining me behind a computer, designing stuff. Some of it’s cool. Most of it is pretty boring.

As much as I love my mother, she was never a very imaginative cook. So, I grew up with no love of food, because there was no food to love. Trust me, “Creamed Salmon on Toast” should never be foisted on anyone’s palate; even if gathering state secrets requires the use of Jack Bauer-esque techniques.

And so it wasn’t until I started cooking for myself that I learned to love food for more than its role as fuel. Well, except for Beef Stroganoff. I’ve always loved Beef Stroganoff.

So where was I? Oh yes, twelve years went by. In the last half of those twelve, my passion for cooking had caused many to tell me I should follow that passion to culinary school. I balked at the idea, and pretended that I didn’t want to spend a decade in a low paying job to get even close to getting a coveted chef-de-cuisine position.

In reality, I didn’t want to do it because I was afraid. Fear of success has always been a problem of mine. But that’s a tale for another day.

My thirst for culinary knowledge finally got to the point where I could no longer contain it. I took the plunge and enrolled in a two-year culinary program George Brown College’s renown chef school. And boy did I kick ass there, graduating with honours and a letter of recognition from the Dean.

From there I spent a couple of years both working and staging (an internship of sorts) in some of the best restaurants in Toronto. Not an easy thing to do in your mid-thirties. If you’re over twenty, many chefs will think twice about hiring you on, as you are less likely to work for pennies or have the stamina for ten to fifteen hour work days. I’m guessing the fact that people tend to think I’m younger than I really am has kept me from being immediately shown the door on more than one occasion.

And then, during a rather busy late-summer brunch service, a tragedy happened; bacon grease got spilled on the floor!

A waste of anything bacon-related is always tragic. Imagine the smoky quiche crust that could’ve been made using a mixture of bacon grease and butter. Or the warm vinaigrette whose acidity could’ve been wonderfully balanced with that fatty salty flavour that very few things other than bacon can offer.

Well, I interrupted that bacon tragedy with my own. As I said, it was a very busy brunch. The restaurant’s regular dishwasher called in sick and the night guy was called to fill in. Brunch generally means there’s a lot of bacon. Sheet pans and sheet pans of it are cooked. Used greasy sheet pans ended up being placed in an area of the dishpit that they shouldn’t have. The dishwasher also didn’t seem used to the pace and intensity of brunch (there’s a reason most cooks hate having to work it) and this one was particularly hectic. He was so bogged down that he wasn’t able to get washed dishes out to stations fast enough. So cooks were having to enter the dishpit to get their own.

If you havent put two and two together, allow me to show you the math:

1 dishwasher out of his element
+ bacon grease dripping onto bare floor (rather than over non-slip mats)
+ cooks racing between the dishpit and their stations holding handfuls of dishes
= fall down go boom.

The falling itself wouldn’t have done much but bruise my ego. It was the two hands full of bowls that made all the difference.

Witnesses remember it being in slow motion. It happened so fast for me I don’t really remember hitting the floor. I do know I fell with a lean to my left. When I hit the ground, the bowls shattered. At least one of which decided it liked the taste of blood and entered into my thumb, lacerating nerve and tendon.

So I was all of the sudden on the ground in a quickly growing pool of blood. My thumb now looked like a shark. Not like a shark attacked it, but an actual shark. When you tell people you’re a cook and you cut your thumb, the first thing they think is that it was with a knife. Haha! You fools!

Fellow cooks might be impressed to know I somehow managed to keep the blood off my whites, with the exception of a few drops near the ankle of my checks. That’s professionalism, folks!

The amount of blood on the floor made a veteran server in his mid-30s actually scream like a girl.

I was rushed to the hospital lucid and talkative but in a state of shock. After many hours of waiting, I was temporarily stitched up. Four days later I was having surgery to repair the nerve and tendon. It went well and I my hand was put in an immobilizing cast.

Three days after that however, I was in extreme pain. Peering as much as I could into the cast, I discovered my thumb swollen and stitches split. The next morning, I was admitted to the hospital with a staph infection.

I (like 10% of the population) am quite seriously allergic to penicillin. So I was blasted with extremely potent intravenous vancomycin, which is particularly unkind to your kidneys. Yay! Good thing I didn’t have any E.Coli infections when I was a kid, otherwise I might have to spend the rest of my life worrying about future kidney problems! Oh, wait…

Anyhow, for five days I was in a hospital bed with a MRSA infection. Well, they (the Infection Diseases department of the hospital) told me it was MRSA, but seem to deny that now, saying only it was a “gram positive coccus infection”. Conspiracy, perhaps?

For weeks, my thumb looked like a zombie toe. Physiotherapy was painful and regular. After nearly 7 months, I had only marginal use of my left thumb. This was attributable to large amounts of scar tissue holding down the tendon. Additional surgery was performed, but despite starting the physiotherapy the day after the surgery, scar tissue again won the battle.

Suffice it to say, my left hand is not exactly in tip top shape. Picking things up with it seems to be only marginally more effective than a claw machine at Chuck-E-Cheese. And I’ve been told it’s quite likely it’s a permanent thing. It doesn’t stop me from cooking at home, but it’s enough of an impediment to make working in a fast paced kitchen both difficult and potentially dangerous.

So, here I am. My love of cooking is still growing, but a big outlet is gone. I started this blog in hopes of building something bigger out of it. Hopefully, readers will get out as much as I hope to put in.

   Permalink

May 1st, 2012

Zang standing in front of  a barn.This site is written, designed and maintained by James Nazaroff, AKA “Zang”.

Cook. Artist. Designer.

This site started off on an installation of WordPress 3.4, with a custom designed HTML5/CSS3 theme. Plugins used include Akismet, Lightbox Plus, WP to Twitter, Link Checker, RYO Category Visibility and Add New Avatar. A few minor changes have been made to WordPress base code.

All intents have been made to make the site as resolution independent as possible. Units are relative sizes whenever possible, and no pixel unit elements have been used in its stylesheets.

Utmost respect for W3C standards has been applied.

All design was done on a 2009 24″ Apple iMac with 8GB of RAM and additional funky (but irrelevant) peripherals.

PHP, HTML and CSS work was done in Espresso.

Graphics created in Adobe Illustrator CS5, with additional manipulation in Adobe Photoshop CS5

Hosted on 1and1.com.

The preferred typeface used in this site is Helvetica Neue (A.K.A. Neue Helvetica). Standard Helvetica makes and okay substitute, but lacks the nuance.

Syndication Feeds are in Atom 1.0 format.

A Canon 550D (T2i) and iPhone 4 are the primary cameras used in the photography.