Cooking with Brains

But now you're running behind schedule because your wife suddenly informs you that four unexpected guests are coming as well. So you prepare extra onion rings. The oil is ready and to save time you fry them all at once. But this time, instead of them turning out crunchy, they're soggy and oily. What went wrong?

Fried foods cook, in part by steaming from the inside out. The intensely hot oil causes the internal moisture in the food to boil, which then escapes as steam. The outward rush of steam prevents the surrounding oil from permeating the food and making it greasy.

This equilibrium creates that nirvana of a crunchy outside and a tender, non-oily inside. If the oil's temperature is too low, insufficient steam is produced, the oil wins the shoving match, and your food tastes like a grease sponge.

Adding any amount of food to hot oil will drop the temperature of the oil. Adding a lot of food will lower it so much that it cannot recover quickly enough before steam will prevent it from infiltrating the food.

Our inundated host should have cooked his onion rings in batches and poured his guests an extra beer in the meantime. 325 ? 375 is the target temperature for most fried foods by the way. Procure a frying thermometer and eliminate the guesswork.

INADEQUATE INSTRUCTIONS

One day you decide to make homemade bread for the first time. One of the steps in the recipe says to dissolve the active dry yeast in warm water for 5 minutes. You do so, continue on with the recipe and in the end discover that your bread did not rise. What went wrong?

Simple. The recipe instructions were vague and deficient. Did you take the temperature of the water before adding the yeast? Of course not. The instructions didn't tell you to.

Yeast is a living organism. It consumes sugars and expels carbon dioxide as a byproduct. This process, known as leavening, is what makes dough rise. Active dry yeast needs to be "proofed," i.e., activated in warm water first. But the water must be between 100 and 110 degrees, preferably 105 to 110.

Beyond 110 degrees it starts to die. Below 100 and it will not fully activate. Either way the leavening effect will be compromised and you'll be making pitas instead of dinner rolls.

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