September 7, 2004

• Basic Cooking: The Big Three

  
  

  The past two weeks of Soul Food have been kind of hectic, but the food turned out well in the end.  Each time it took a lot of tinkering.  So cooking has been on my mind recently, and I’ve been trying to distill the most important things to keep in mind.  They boil down to three basic rules:

  
  

  
  
  1. Use Fresh Ingredients.  Remember: red meat isn’t bad for you — fuzzy blue-green meat is.
      
     
  2. Timing Is Everything.  Some foods are very tricky to time (caramel, blackened tuna, pad thai).  Others, like stew, can be cooked from 1-12 hours.  You should know if you’re cooking a high-maintenance food and treat it accordingly.
      
     
  3. Just Enough Salt.  All foods are high-maintenance when it comes to the right amount of salt.  Too little, and the food is either bland or overpowered by the other spices.  Too much, and well, you know what happens.  Somewhere in between is the perfect level that brings out, but doesn’t dominate, the flavors of the main ingredients.

  • 1:38 pm
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