Tis the season

Recent studies have shown a pretty high intake of salt, blamed mostly on processed foods. There’s no doubt that eating that Big Mac (31% of the suggested daily intake of sodium) or even a Lean Cuisine (often 14% to 29% of the daily intake) is going to up your salt consumption. But let me tell you, eating out ain’t gonna help much either.

If there’s one thing that novice cooks fail at, it’s seasoning food correctly. When I first started at the restaurant, I was constantly being told to season more aggressively. In fact, some dishes I’d have to season every component; in the lobster appetizer I’d have to season the cheese, the tomatoes, the pickled eggplant, the lobster, and then finish with sea salt.

And every restaurant uses salt liberally. You have to. If you want to properly sweat out aromatics for a soup, you don’t want to have to keep stirring. Just throw in some salt to draw out the water and prevent carmelization. This also concentrates the flavor of whatever you’re cooking. And salt to finish is used primarily for texture—sea salt is crunchy.

Just something to think about next time you’re turning your nose up at McDonald’s and eating out at a nice restaurant.

Food is gross

Of course I love food; that's why I'm trying to be a chef. But during the first few days of culinary school we were taught that, basically, food is pretty gross.

Our professor (we'll call him Chef M, to protect the innocent) told us tales of how at the start of his career, he didn't know anything about the proper cooling methods or serving temperatures, didn't follow the "danger zone" method, and wasn't constantly checking food with a thermometer. And apparently this is not an aberration.

So, food is gross. Let me count the ways (according to Chef M and other reputable sources):

Contamination. It's a pretty safe bet that at some point, you're going to eat a vegetable that's been cross-contaminated with chicken, or a piece of meat that wasn't cooked to the right temperature. Heck, you can apparently even cultivate botulism--a nasty bacteria found most often in bulging, old cans of vegetables--by not properly caring for caramelized onions or garlic in olive oil.

The government ain't watching your back. Even if you've never read Michael Pollan, you probably know all about the "evils" of corn (as in, corn syrup). It's pretty much the staple of most of the ranching community, being fed to most livestock for years due to government promotion of corn and soy. Uncle Sam has played favorites with other industries as well. Take cottonseed--as in the seed made from the plant associated more with clothing than food, but which also is used to create some oils. It is not regulated as highly as other ingredients because it is considered a textile, and not a food by the Department of Agriculture. And so it apparently contains more pesticides than other oils.

Thomas Jefferson hates you. Some widely used cooking utensils and ingredients are made using nickel, which may be cancer-causing, some say. Margarine, for example, is made using nickel (bad in large doses) and cadmium (bad in pretty much most doses, apparently). It's basically vegetable oil that is "hardened" using the metals so it looks somewhat like butter. Stainless steel, also, is made using nickel. Of course, the jury is still out regarding how bad nickel is when eaten. But I'd be a little leery of anything used also as currency.

Stupid vegetarians. Vegetarians like to tell people they eat much healthier than them because they avoid all those hormone-infested meats. But the recent peanut and pistachio salmonella scares should show that meat is a part of our food system (some people say salmonella can get into the nuts because chicken shit is used as manure in the fields, and the chickens pass the bacteria onto the peanuts). But apparently soy is also really bad for you. As in, if you eat tofu or other non-fermented soy products, it sucks nutrients out of your body. So make sure you eat a nice hunk of raw tuna next time you plow through a bowl of salted edamame.

Paranoia and Big Business-Big Brother conspiracies aside, it's pretty apparent that some foods are better than others. But my own personal view is that if you eat a wide variety of things, you'll be fine. So crack open a can of Coke Zero with possibly harmful aspartame, put a small dollop of margarine on your white toast and cook a steak in your stainless steel pan. Just make sure it's a very rare occurrence, and eat organic veggies, fruits and meats much more often.