Introduction: Even the food conscious home cooks and trendy restaurants sometimes suffer from an ignorance of cooking fundamentals. Sometimes it’s an honest mistake. Hiring Holly Hypertension for grill station can result in grossly undersalted food. Timid Timmy will destroy your expensive Tuna dish because raw = not good. We have been trained by our parents, our government, and the coked-up 80’s that we must cook all of our food “well done”, resulting in an unstoppable epidemic of overcooking. People judge ingredients by the store it is in, by the shelf it sits on, by the really hot alterna-hipster at the checkout counter you’re embarrassed to say whose actual gender is unclear, but you’d fillet them any day. And for some ungodly reason, people (and restaurants are not off the hook here either) don’t taste the food before serving. ZOMG, lol, I’ll brb after I HiT (that’s hork in toilet).
I’m going to lay it down for you old school. The “Cooking Fundamentals in Three Paragraphs” series will explore the deepest causes of bad food, and how to fix them. Sit down, get a really strong drink, and prepare for humiliation.
The Over-Under Rule: I can attribute most food problems to two things: overcooking and undersalting.
When recipes go wrong (and they do with shocking frequency), we fall back on fear.
