Cooking is like love.

It should be entered into

with abandon or not at all.

Harriet Van Horne

INTRODUCTION

Play or Chore?

Is it a play or is it a chore? The art and science of cooking and baking may be either. If

your kitchen work is a play, you'll get years of fun reading this book and decades of references

that you'll keep checking and rechecking (and may be revising). If you are into other things, and

cooking for you is a genuine, certified chore, this book will help ease the pain, make the chore

efficient and quick, and the results more likely to be beyond just edible. In fact, you may even

become addicted and become one of the players.

This book is the result of many years of research into the immense culinary disciplines,

written for both the professional and the home cook. It is also the result of numerous kitchen

tests and experiments. The ancient art of cooking is still filled with many kitchen myths without

foundation—myths that have been propagated from generation to generation. Some have

scientific bases and are perfectly valid. Others are also valid but food scientists still don't know

why. There are kitchen myths without rhyme or reason, and only testing and re-testing in the

kitchen proves or invalidates them.

There are other myths that are new propagated by current fashionable chefs, cooks and

food writers, either through ignorance or snobbery. For example, many culinary professionals

state that imported pure durum wheat Italian pastas are far better than even the best domestic

pastas. Kitchen tests showed otherwise. Besides, Italian pasta makers import most of their durum

wheat from the wheat-growing regions of Canada and the United States, and their pasta-making

techniques are not superior to our own. So why would their pasta be better?

Focus on simple, common-sense cooking

Most new cookbooks today focus on new styles of cooking—trendy and unusual

ingredients are “in”, with exotic-sounding recipe titles and catchy phrases such as "nap the plate

with the sauce", "transporting the flavor", "mildly sweet to assertively spicy" and "intensify and

magnify the flavors".

In this book I prefer the basic approach to everyday cooking. The focus is how to produce

simple yet best-tasting foods with least effort, most efficiency, shortest time and with available

fresh ingredients. Exotic, hard-to-find food items rarely make a food better. In fact, they are

often of inferior quality because their slower turnover in the market. For instance, pine nuts are

authentic ingredient in an Italian pesto, but fresh pine nuts are not often available and they are

Serious Kitchen Play