About the section
Bea Wilson is a British food journalist and author. Author of books on culinary topics and active in promoting education in the field of food. Her column TABLE TALK, which deals with eating habits, is published in the Wall Street Journal and is published exclusively in Globes
The late American food writer Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor used to say that she knew when her chicken was ready by hearing. She knew when the moment the chicken became crispy and golden by the sound of the oil bubbling.
“Sometimes,” she once told an interviewer, “people ask me: ‘How long does it take? 15 minutes? 20 minutes?’. I answer: You must listen to the sound of the oil. Listen to the music.”
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When we cook, we stick to precise times in order to achieve the best results. We boil the pasta for exactly 10 minutes and roast the chicken, weighing half a kilo, for 20 minutes.
As I prepare more meals, I’ve learned that sticking to times doesn’t always get the best results. After ten minutes, pasta may be al dente or overdone. The only way to know for sure if pasta is ready is to fish a noodle out of the water and taste it. If you trust the timer more than you trust yourself, you will often end up with an unpalatable dinner. The best cooks are those – like Wartma Smart-Grovnor – who are confident enough to get rid of the timer in the kitchen.
The data is taken from the website howlongtocook.org which calculates cooking, baking, steaming, roasting and frying times. Photos: Shutterstock
How long should the steak be grilled?
The times indicated in the recipes cannot be the last word in the kitchen, not only because the author of the recipe has no idea about your kitchen, oven and pans. in her book
Cook This Book: Techniques that Teach and Recipes to Repeat The American recipe developer Molly Buzz writes that because of the variety of ovens on the market, the times indicated in the recipes should be treated as guidelines only.
The example she gives is a steak: “If the recipe says ‘roast the steak, four to five minutes, until it is golden brown,’ and after five minutes your steak is only slightly golden, continue to roast it until it reaches the desired color.”
If you stick to the timer, the cooking experience can be disappointing. I have been making crepes for many years. I fry for 30 seconds one side, turn and fry the other side for 10 seconds. These times provide me with browned and perfect crepes, as long as I make them at home.
When I visited my relatives, I made crepes in their kitchen. I didn’t know their oven and pan. The preparation times I know from home were not relevant. After 30 seconds, the crepe was pale. After two minutes, his fringe isn’t done yet. It took me three and a half minutes to brown the first side and another minute to brown the other side. If I had trusted the timer in the kitchen, there would have been no breakfast that day.
How long should the egg be cooked?
When we measure the time in the kitchen, what we are really trying to get to is the moment when the dish reaches perfection, not a fraction beyond that.
The timer minutes also represent the temperature, softness and crispiness of the food. Think of eggs. When we talk about a “3 minute egg”, what we are really talking about is an egg that has been boiled to a temperature between 61 and 67 degrees.
Whether it takes 3 or 4 minutes – it depends on the size of the egg and whether the water was hot or cold when you put the eggs in. My perfect soft-boiled egg, for example, is a large egg that I put in a pot of boiling water. I leave it there for 6 minutes.
The term à point in French means things that are just at the right stage of ripeness. The word “chuai” in Chinese describes the moment when foods reach perfect maturity; From this moment on, their flavors and textures will not get any better.
When does that perfect moment come? It depends on the ingredients. The cooking times of hard winter vegetables are longer than the cooking times of soft summer leaves.
I’m not saying we should stop using timers. There is no more delightful time than the moment you put something in the oven and set the timer for another hour, knowing that dinner is slowly cooking.
When you’re baking a cake, you don’t want to open the oven every few minutes to check what’s going on with it. When I bake a cake, I set the timer for 5 to 10 minutes less than the time specified in the recipe, to check and smell it.
Before timers became common items in kitchens, cooks found original ways to time the craft of cooking. In his book Slippery Noodles: A Culinary History of China, Hsiang Yu Lin explains that in China, in the 17th century, an incense stick was used as a timer.
In ancient Chinese recipes, cooks were instructed as follows: “Steaming chicken – duration of burning one incense stick”. The incense stick was made of tree resin. The duration of its burning was about 30 minutes.
How long should the nuts be boiled?
In medieval Europe, in kitchens without clocks, recipes were timed not by minutes but by prayers. A French recipe for preserved nuts ordered to boil them for the time needed to say the Mizarra text (chapter 9 of the Psalms) “Clean me from my sins”, about two minutes.
Time is a subjective as well as an objective measure, and this is as true in the kitchen as anywhere else. If you ask me, the best timer in the kitchen is music, because it makes you stop counting the minutes and start enjoying them.
I like to schedule every exhausting task in the kitchen with songs, not timers. Washing dishes usually takes me two Beatles songs or one Stevie Wonder song. It’s about 6 minutes, but they go by fast.