Results tagged “cooking”

Last Friday was my birthday. Hooray! I have a fantastic wife, so she treated me to a pig-butchering class at The Brooklyn Kitchen. I like meat, and I like being educated about what I eat and respecting the animals I consume. So Tom Mylan was a fantastic person to lead the evening: Knowledgeable and passionate about his work as a butcher, and (as his blog demonstrates well) able to articulate that in a way that's approachable even to rank amateurs like me.

Even better, my wife posted a great writeup over on Serious Eats. There's lots more info on other Brooklyn Kitchen classes and on Tom there. And as I've mentioned before, I love displays of true competence, especially in regard to knives. And Tom has a stellar post about choosing knives which shows off exactly that kind of expertise.

There's a lot of cuts of meat in a pig, as the diagram here shows. (That's courtesy of the Wikipedia page on pork.) And if you, like me, want to see more examples of the process of breaking down a sizable animal, Adam Fields has a full photo set, and The Brooklyn Kitchen's Flickr account has a photo set on the making of head cheese. Both of those photo albums are probably not for those squeamish about butchering.

• Ask The Meatman offers an Interactive Pork Chart.
• Ben Trott went whole-hog as well.
• Chris Cosentino butchers a pig's head — with video!

I could ramble on about this forever, but we have about 15 pounds of fresh pork in the kitchen now, so there's work to be done.

[P]erhaps the two best examples of how [religion-based food] bans have resulted in delicious and fascinating food are Jain cooking, with its ban on anything that remotely involves taking life, like root vegetables (little critters might get killed while you dig them up) or yoghurt left overnight (too alive), and Jewish cooking, with its complex set of Torah derived rules including bans on pork, on fish without scales (shark, shellfish) and on cooking milk and meat together. I'm not concerned at the moment with the logic of these bans, just their results.

That's from a fascinating article in India's Economic Times. As much reverence as there is in American culture for "thinking outside the box", I'm always fascinated by the things people cook up by rooting around inside the box.

Ryan Freitas, whose culinary wisdom I can personally vouch for, just shared some insights into his idea that designers can learn a lot from the discipline of a well-run kitchen.

The article in Ambidextrous magazine (download the three-page PDF, it should only take a minute) starts with a simple parallel between the two disciplines:

With careers as an interaction designer and a professional cook (sometimes simultaneously), I've noticed striking similarities between the design studio and the kitchen. Like their peers in design, chefs are under constant creative and competitive pressure to execute and innovate. Both professionals service an increasingly savvy customer base in a public landscape where only the tastemakers and trendsetters survive.

Though it's not mentioned in Ryan's article, the most relevant concept to me seemed to be the idea of mise en place, which is basically the discipline that good cooks have of preparing all of their requirements at the ready and properly placed when they begin to prepare a dish. From ingredients to utensils to preparation surfaces to oven temperature, getting everything lined up perfectly means a chef never has to pause to take care of preliminaries while in the midst of creating a meal.

I'm far from a serious cook myself, but I've found that keeping mise in mind when getting ready to cook something forces me to have to actually think through every step of the task I'm about to perform. So it's not merely that all the ingredients are chopped up, it's that knowing what to chop, and how much, makes it imperative that I'm keeping a mental image of the entire process in the front of my mind.

And good design mimics this process by giving you an experience that anticipates mise en place. You find, in the course of using a tool or performing a task, that a designed has thought through the entire process of your task at hand and placed the information and raw materials you need right where you'll need them. Delicious!