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Media Review: Cook's Magazine
My wife and I are great eaters -- and also great cooks. We cook foods we have encountered all over the world, in France, in Samoa, in Indonesia, in Tahiti. With all the recipes we have, we still find Cook's Illustrated Magazine one of the most valuable and interesting magazines on cooking available. Just thumbing through two or three copies at random to note the dishes described in them only gives a small hint at the strengths of this magazine. On the cover of one issue, for instance, I see listed the following: "Perfecting Glazed Chicken," "BBQ Pork Chops," "Best Ways to Cook Common Vegetables," "Cast Iron versus Nonstick," "Rating Parmesan," "Ultimate Apple Tart," "Beef Vegetable Soup," "Grilled Stuffed Pork Loin," "Chicken Tikka Masala," "Better Rocotta Gnocchi," and "Crispy Pear Cisp." About twenty recipes with a few sauces and variations doesn't seem like much when you compare the number of recipes in any issue of Bon Appetit or Gourmet. But what makes Cook's Illustrated Magazine more valuable than these other magazines is that the discussions of the dishes really teach you how to cook. In one of the issues before me, David Pazmino's article "Improving Cheap Roast Beef" provides a great example. He spent a week experimenting with different cuts and finally settled on one he liked best (boneless eye round roast). Then he spent a day or two cooking this cut different ways, first at a high heat, then at a low heat. He liked the lower heat version, but then he experimented to determine just which temperature was best. When no temperature seemed to cook the beef perfectly, he tried cooking it at two diffent temperatures. In this recipe as in others found in Cook's Illustrated Magazine, there are what amount to chemical explanations of what cooking does and how to get the results you want. For instance, Pazmino explains "Next I tried salting the meat for first four, then 12, then 24 hours. As might be expected the roast benefited most from the longest salting. Because the process of osmosis causes salt to travel from areas of higher to lower concentration, the full 24 hours gave it the most time to penetrate deep into the meat. There was another benefit: Salt, like the enzymes in meat, breaks down proteins to further improve texture." Whether a recipe is for oatmeal cookies or Chicken Kiev, it will probably contain one or more discussions like this one. These explain what will happen if you use butter, what will happen if you substitute Crisco, what will happen if you use olive oil -- all to the same recipe. These details are exactly what you don't find in most other cookbooks or cooking magazines. In other words, reading a few issues starts to give you a good sense of some aspects of the chemistry of cooking. Once you understand what goes on within a each particular cooking process and what any changes in that recipe will do to the final result, you don't have to experiment and guess anymore. The results, thanks to the explanations in Cook's Illustrated Magazine, will be predictible. Cook's Illustrated has a web site: Cooksillustrated.com |
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