The Thinking Tummy
I picked up a new book, Ruhlman’s Twenty, and after downing about half the pages in an afternoon, I’ve joined Team Recommend It To Everyone I Know Who Eats Food. The book covers twenty cooking techniques that simplify and center those who cook at any skill level. In short: Read. This. Book.
The first technique discussed is the most overlooked, but by far the most necessary:
Thinking in the kitchen is underrated.
Thinking.
Before you begin. Stand still. Think. — @ruhlman
Michael, thank you for approaching the elephant in the room that most new (and even some of the more well-seasoned) cooks are so stumped by. There’s a lot of logic to cooking, but it’s not only rational. As we conceive of and execute experiment after experiment, the only way we get better is to observe and react. In short: you have to think for it to work.
I watched this battle of brain versus food happen first-hand this past January, while serving as a cooking mentor to someone who had never even understood what it meant to boil water, much less cook something in it. Over the course of a month, I saw a timid but hungry pupil progress to a state of sated yet hungry for more; the bottomless pit of my pupil’s tummy expanding beyond the digestive system to their brain as well. Cooking: it’s not just for your stomach anymore.
When beginning the thinking-as-an-element-of-cooking exercise, it helps to have spaces that wake up your brain’s salivary glands. An amuse bouche for your neurons, if you will. My go-to list of places that encourages food thinking include:
- How to Cook Everything (though now, I’m very much smitten with How to Cook Everything Vegetarian for my mostly plant-based diet) — basics and tried-and-true combinations next to more creative variations, provided by the genius of minimalist cook Mark Bittman.
- Food52 — a cooking community that encoruages thinking outside the icebox and beyond the reaches of food convention while in the kitchen.
- Alton Brown — whatever I can absorb from him, on Twitter, his books, or Good Eats.
- Food blogs (centralized through aggregation sites like Foodgawker) — browsing them keeps my brain churning with possible new things to mosh together and create into new food items.
At any point while my mind is wandering, I’m pondering a never-ending combinatoric of ingredients. Usually my brain is only settled by making something to quench that quest, but I’m finding other ways, too, like talking about cooking with fellow #foodhatters and writing about my process. Recipes, yes, but also pieces like this, where I can prioritize thinking as still step one of the cooking process.
