Take a recipe for Italian sausage, for instance. The recipe
in this book has you combine pork shoulder with salt and
some aromatics, let the meat rest overnight, and then grind it
and knead it the next day. Now, you’ve tasted my Italian
sausage, and fair enough, you think it’s got too much
fennel. OK, so you use less fennel and more marjoram the
next time instead. Because you’ve read the sausage chapter
and understand that the keys to a great-textured sausage are
the interaction between the salt and meat and the method by
which the ground meat is mixed, you’re confident that
changing the spicing will still allow you to produce a great-
tasting link. At the same time, you know that salt is what
dissolves muscle proteins and allows them to cross-link,
giving your sausage that snappy, juicy texture, so you can’t
cut back on the salt the same way you can with the fennel.
Likewise, you know that you can make your sausage out of
turkey or lamb if you’d like, but you can’t change the fat
content if you want it to remain juicy.
Fact: Cooking by rote—even when your mentors are
some of the greatest chefs in the world—is paralyzing. Only
by understanding the underlying principles involved in
cookery can you free yourself from both recipes and blindly
accepted conventional wisdom.
Starting to get an idea of what I’m talking about?
Freedom. That’s what.
WHY THIS BOOK?
In many ways, the blog format is ideal for the type of work I
do. I get to write about things in a pretty informal way and