J. Kenji López-Alt Answers Cooking Questions From Twitter

Hey there guys, gals and non-binary pals,

this is chef and author Kenji López-Alt,

and I'm here to answer your cooking questions on Twitter.

This is Cooking Support.

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@dollarsmore asks, what's the difference of cooking

Chinese food with a wok than your regular frying

or sauce pan?

All right, so the main difference between a frying pan,

a Western-style frying pan like this, and a wok

is obviously this shape.

So the way a wok heats up, you're gonna get a really hot

zone in the center down here where it's closest

to the flame, and then it's going to get progressively

cooler.

A western-style frying pan on the other hand,

all of this is meant to be relatively evenly heated,

so you don't get those cooking zones.

In a Western skillet, you're going to be shaking around,

and when you around like this, when you're sauteing

something, the food naturally forms an even layer

and it cooks evenly.

And that's really good for sweating vegetables,

the things that you might do at the beginning

of a soup, or a sauce, or a stock, something like that.

Whereas in a wok, when you shake it, they obviously all fall

down to the bottom so you don't get an even layer.

However, in a wok, the shape allows you to really efficient

get food moving through the air, and that's the process

you're gonna be doing when you're stir frying the majority

of the time.

So that's difference between a wok and a Western skillet.

@truevisuals asks, what's with asparagus and stinky pee?

Asparagus contains these sulfur compounds that some people

can digest and some people cannot.

It's estimated that about 20 to 50% of people

cannot adjust these sulfur compounds, and for those of us,

which includes me, if you eat asparagus, about 15 minutes

later, go pee and your pee is going to smell

like these sulfur compounds.

So there's a very distinct asparagus pee smell.

Now this gets confounded by the fact that there are also

some people who can smell these compounds and some people

who can't.

TaineMcLean says how do you ruin a good burger?

So personally, there's a few things I like to avoid

when I'm making a burger.

I don't like adding things inside the burger.

So I don't like adding egg crumbs, or eggs, or spices,

or seasonings.

I feel when you do that, it turns it more into a meatloaf,

what I associate with a meatloaf texture and flavor.

So I like just pure ground beef.

I do like to have it plenty fatty.

So you know, something around 25 to 30% fat in my burger,

that's what I want.

I want it nice and salty, whether it's gonna be thick

or thin, I want it to have a nice deeply brown crust.

There are some people who like steamed burgers,

it's a thing, but please don't steam my burger. [laughs]

@HaitianSOUL asks, does anybody know how to butcher

a whole chicken?

Uh, me, I know how to butcher a chicken.

So I'll show you right here.

So why would you wanna butcher a whole chicken?

It'll save you money.

It's cheaper to buy a whole chicken than to buy

the individual parts.

It also gives you lots of tasty things like the backbones

and the carcass, you'll use those to make stocks

that are better than what you could buy in a box.

We are gonna first take off the legs.

There's this little flab of skin that stretches out.

All you gotta do is kind of nick that with a sharp knife,

just like that, and do the same thing on the other side.

Just give it a little nick.

Get your thumbs in there and twist them until the joints

pop out.

Now you hold it by one leg with the chicken kind of hanging

down, and then what you wanna do is you want to get

your knife in here, and right here is a little nugget

of meat called the oyster, you want that to come with you,

you don't want it to stay in the carcass cause it's tasty.

So we're gonna try it as much as possible to get our knife

down into there.

And then we just go through the joint,

which we just popped out, and then you have your leg.

Same thing on the other side, make sure we get the oyster.

Look for the articulation, the place where the two joints

meet, right there.

Now you want to get your knife right in that slot,

and just cut through.

All of this should be pretty easy.

If you feel yourself forcing it, then you're hit the bone

and you want to reset.

I like to leave my chicken breasts with the skin on

and bone in typically when I'm cooking them.

So the way I do that is first I take this wing off,

twist the chicken around until you've cut all the meat

around that wing, and your knife is in contact with the bone

the whole way.

So we see some bare bone here.

Flip it like that and it pops right off.

And you have this nice exposed bone,

which is gonna look really pretty when you cook it.

And then you can get the whole chicken wing

with the drumette and the flat attached.

Okay, and now for your chicken breast, you cut down

into the ribs, and this is the only place

where you're gonna be cutting through bones.

The ribs are pretty easy to cut through though.

You go all the way down, flip this inside-out,

the wishbone's gonna pop right out like that.

There's your chicken back, you can chop that up

to make stock with.

Split the chicken right down the sternum.

And there you've got a bone in, skin on chicken breast

for cooking.

And then if you do want to remove the chicken breast

from the carcass, what you're gonna do is run the tip

of your knife basically along one side of the sternum.

The meat should separate pretty easily.

Run your thumb along the meat and pull it away

from that connective tissue.

Then just finish it off with your knife,

and then you've got your boneless chicken breast.

And that is how you butcher a chicken.

@joshnamaharaj asks, hey peeps, doing some research,

how do you get really crispy skin on your roasted chicken?

To get really crispy chicken skin, there's a few steps

you have to take.

What I like to do is spatchcock it, so I cut out

the backbone with a pair of scissors.

You can ask the butcher to do it for you also,

then you can lay it out flat so you get all this surface

area exposure to the heat of the oven.

Finally, the other thing I like to do is I season it

with a mixture of kosher salt and baking powder.

Mix it up in a bowl, sprinkle it all over your chicken.

What have happens is the baking powder will react with some

of the juices that are coming out of the chicken skin,

and those juices are really rich in protein,

and they form these teeny tiny bubbles,

that as they dehydrate they add surface area

and therefore extra crunch to your chicken skin.

@FIOONANANA, I didn't know that radiation is also one

of the heat transfer methods for food.

How the hell radiation cooks food?

[laughs] So there are three basic types of heat transfer.

Whether you're talking about food or anything.

There is conduction, that's when I touch a hot metal pan

and the heat is going directly from the metal surface.

There is convection, which is when the heat is transferred

through a medium, such as flowing air or flowing water.

And then there's radiation, when you don't need any kind

of contact at all.

The most common form of radiation you're probably gonna find

in your cooking is when you're baking something in the oven.

An oven cooks through a combination of convection in the air

and infrared radiation directly from the oven walls.

So whenever you're cooking over coals or under a broiler,

the type of heating that you're doing is radiation.

It's direct heat energy coming from the heat source

through the vacuum of space or through the air, as it were.

@WorseMake asks, tell me, Hank, what constitutes a pinch

of oregano, a smidge of basil, and what is salting to taste?

Whose taste? What kind of taste?

So if somebody says a pinch of oregano or a pinch of cumin,

I would think that it's about this, about a 16th

of a teaspoon or so.

But if you love oregano, you love cumin, put more of it in,

it doesn't really matter.

The one case where it does matter is with salt,

because salt can have a severe impact on the way foods cook

because it chemically interacts with meats,

it chemically interacts with a bunch of different things.

But with salt, typically what you're looking for is around

a 1 to 2% ratio of salt to other stuff in each given bite.

So if I have a soup, I can weigh out the soup and I can add

1% of that weight in salt, and it will taste relatively

well-seasoned to most people.

@eari_m asks, does anyone want to know how the sausages

are made?

Well, that's an easy question, I wanna know how the sausage

is made.

I started a sausage restaurant in San Mateo,

so I have a good deal of knowledge about how sausage

is made.

So yes, sausages have this reputation of being sort of

lower quality meat, they're made out of scraps.

I think that's good, it's a way to use up all the different

,parts of the animals. They are just meat, fat, seasonings,

importantly, salt, and then they are stuffed into casings.

So in a sausage, there are a few elements.

So when you cut open a sausage, what you're going to see

is a few things.

First, there's going to be the meat.

Sausages are often made from pork shoulder, the lean meat,

that's gonna be the darker colored parts.

You're going to see the fat, which are these creamier

white parts.

You might see little specs in there, and those are gonna be

the spices that you're adding to flavor it.

Finally, the most important element that you won't see

with your eye is the salt.

You cannot make a sausage without salt.

What happens is when you mix ground meat with salt,

and you start kneading it, the salt will dissolve some

of the muscle proteins and it allows them to stick together

and it forms this protein matrix.

So salt and meat is what gives a sausage structure.

The casings are typically made out of pig intestines.

If you get a big, great big salami, that's probably

a cow intestine.

And if you're getting a natural casing hotdog,

that is a lamb intestine.

Yes, nothing to be afraid of, great way to use up all

the different parts of the animal, and delicious.

@bbychumpz says, why do eggs make normal food taste better?

Burgers, ramen, more eggs?

Put an egg on dat hoe and call it a meal. [laughs]

If you think about it, an egg is a thing that contains

all the nutrients a growing embryo needs.

So it's nutrient dense, and our bodies are hardwired

to like foods that are nutrient dense.

That's why eggs taste so delicious, it's as simple as that.

So we taste it and we think, yum, this is good.

@thescramble asks, question for you, how often do you

sharpen your knives and how do you do it?

I sharpen my knives probably once every six months or so.

I like to use waterstones.

This one is 1,000 and 6,000.

The lower the number, the grittier it is.

So I typically start with 800 to 1,000 or so,

and then go up to around 6,000.

So from the cutting edge to the back, and divide that

by three.

And what you wanna do is maintain that angle the entire time

you're sharpening.

I go in one direction for about 20 strokes or so.

And by that point, the metal gets pushed up and it curls

over the edge of the knife.

I should feel a burr on that side.

Then you can flip the knife over and start working

on the other side.

And so I'll start with 20 on each side until I feel a burr

on both sides, then I'll go down to 10 on each side,

then I'll go down to something like four, then two,

and then I'll do a single strokes.

And once that's all done, I'll move over to a higher grit

stone.

So that's the basic process of sharpening a knife.

@DennisNderitu_ asks, what is myoglobin?

What is the function of myoglobin?

Myoglobin is a pigment that makes our muscles red.

So when you look at a steak and you say, oh,

it's still bloody, that's actually not blood that you're

seeing giving it the color, it's myoglobin,

which is muscle pigment.

Now with some modern meat manufacturers, what they sometimes

do is that if you buy vacuum sealed meat in those pouches,

it'll look very bright red.

And what they've done is they've injected that pouch

with carbon monoxide.

And when carbon monoxide reacts with myoglobin, it turns

into carboxymyoglobin.

There's a myth going around that the food industry is dyeing

meat red to make it look more appealing to customers.

They're not literally dyeing it red,

they're just kind of maintaining that red color

in what may be a sneaky underhanded manner,

but it's not going to affect the quality of the meat.

Alaingruetter says, anyone recommend me a good cooking wok?

What I would recommend for a home cook is a flat bottom

wok.

There's a bunch of materials you can choose from,

carbon steel is the best for a wok because it's inexpensive,

it's indestructible, you can raise it to a really high

temperature.

So here's another wok we have here.

So this is a non-stick wok, so non-stick will be

the material I would be least likely to recommend,

because non-stick cannot be heated to the temperatures

required for certain types of stir frys.

What happens is if you heat up non-stick, the coating

will start the vaporize and it's really unhealthy

to breathe in.

So non-stick woks, I would stay away from them.

@kayeeelah says, why is angel hair pasta so damn sticky?

For something angelic, it sure is a pain in the ass.

Angel hair in particular is going to be very sticky

because for a given volume of pasta, because it's so skinny,

you're going to have a very high amount of surface area.

So the more surface area you have, the more starch

is gonna come out, the more surfaces there are to stick

to each other.

In order to keep pasta from sticking, you do wanna get it

into a sufficient volume of water that you can get it moving

right from the start.

So the main time when pasta's gonna stick together is right

at the beginning as it's starting to cook.

So you wanna make sure that your pasta's moving right

at the beginning.

Once it starts moving, and boiling, and setting,

and softening, it's not really gonna stick as much.

@ChowOyinboNyash asks, can someone please help me,

how do you make fried rice?

I could explain it, but I will just show you instead.

You don't need any specific type of rice.

The most important part is that it is dry.

Take a little bit of corn starch, sprinkle it over,

and that's gonna help you break up the individual grains

of rice.

I recommend a wok.

So you wanna preheat it over really high heat,

and you want everything to go really hot and fast.

I've got a couple eggs, scramble them with just a little

pinch of salt.

Get 'em right in there.

Gonna cook 'em just until they're set.

And then out they go into a bowl we have waiting

on the side.

All right, so now I'm gonna reheat my wok and start working

on my rice.

And the goal here is to really try and separate the grains

without turning them into one big pile of mush.

So you can see I'm using the back of the spatula here

to kind of push 'em against the wok and keep 'em moving

all the time, over the highest heat possible.

Instead of cooking all the rice at once,

if you have a really weak burner, cook it in two different

batches, and then we'll add everything back in at the end.

Wok smoking hot, a little bit more oil in the center.

Onions are gonna go in.

Carrots are gonna go in.

Some of these frozen peas are gonna go in.

I'm gonna add some garlic, a little pinch of scallions.

Now finally, everything is gonna go back in.

So the rice and the eggs, and now what we'll do

is we'll use our spatula to break those eggs up

so that we get a nice even distribution.

Soy sauce around the edge.

Sesame oil.

It's important to add your sauces around edge when

you're cooking in a wok like this, because what happens

is if you add 'em directly to the center,

they kind of trickle down through the food,

so they don't really sear.

Whereas if you add 'em around the edge, you can see they

give that nice sizzle right when you add them.

And what that does is it reduces the soy sauce rapidly

and kind of introduces new flavors, gives it a little bit

of the smokey flavor.

That's basically it.

So try it.

Delicious.

So the big takeaways are, make sure that your rice is dry

before you start cooking with it, cook hot, cook in batches,

and cook fast, and that's basically it.

@_LunaticDestiny asks, why would you use baking soda

while cooking?

Baking soda is a powdered alkaline.

When you take baking soda like this, and you add vinegar

to it, it's going to form carbon dioxide and water.

That's what gives your cakes, and your pancakes, and cookies

lift, right?

It's a chemical leavener.

So you can take baking soda, put it in water and boil

Western-style pasta, and it will give it a springiness

and a flavor very similar to Eastern-style things

like ramen.

You can take baking soda, boil your potatoes,

and what is the higher pH makes it so that the pectin

on the surface of the potato, that's sort of

the carbohydrate glue that holds the potato cells together.

The pectin breaks down faster.

And so you end up with potatoes that are softer

on the exterior so that when you subsequently toss them

and roast them, they get a lot more surface area,

they make them extra crispy.

And finally, you can add baking soda to your beans

if you're planning on making a bean soup or you want them

to tenderize faster.

So I add baking soda to the water when I'm making something

like hummus and I'm cooking the chickpeas,

cause it'll cook the chickpeas much, much faster.

@RenHarker asks, what is so difficult about cooking pork

to a safe temperature?

Maybe your parents' generation or your grandparents'

generation, there was this time when pork was relatively

unsafe to eat at raw or rare temperatures because

of the risk of a parasitic infection called trichinosis.

That has been almost completely eliminated in modern pork.

So it's not really something you have to worry about.

So a lot of modern pork has very, very lean meat,

and therefore it becomes harder to cook and keep juicy

because lean meat dries out a lot faster without the fat

and the connective tissue to keep it moist.

So with pork, what I generally recommend the best way

to cook it to a safe temperature and make it stay juicy

is to brine it.

So if you have a pork chop, you put in a solution

of about 2% salt, 2 to 3% salt in water.

Or you can just sprinkle it with salt and let it sit

in your fridge overnight.

And then when you cook it the next day, what happens is

that salt breaks down on the muscle proteins so that

as they cook, they don't actually constrict as much,

they don't squeeze out as much moisture.

As far as safe cooking temperatures for pork versus beef

versus chicken, the government will recommend that you take

them all to 165 degrees Fahrenheit, which is the temperature

at which you get a seven log reduction in bacteria,

that is only one out of every 10 million bacteria

will survive.

With most meats, I actually recommend cooking to a lower

temperature.

Things like steak are tastier at around 130 degrees,

I think, just when the fat starts to render out.

And things like pork and chicken, I generally cook to about

145 or 150 degrees.

But essentially at 165 degrees, it takes less than a second

for that to occur.

Whereas at about 150 degrees, it takes a matter of minutes.

So as long as you're taking your temperature carefully,

and you're coming up to a specific temperature

and letting it rest at that temperature before serving it,

you can get the same safety level even

at lower temperatures.

@riannotti asks, why is it so difficult to make

perfect rice?

It's either too soggy, sticky, or too hard, help me.

Depending on the type of rice you're using,

you're gonna need a different water to rice ratio.

With something like a Japanese sushi style rice,

which is what I cook most, it's about 1.1 times water

to one part of rice.

I'll measure out my rice, put it in the pot.

Then I'll measure out 1.1 times that volume of rice,

put it into the pot, start it cold, put a flame

underneath it, bring it up to a simmer, put the lid on it,

turn the heat down to the lowest possible setting

and let it simmer at that temperature for about 10 minutes.

Don't open it up, don't look at it, definitely, definitely

do not stir it.

If you start stirring it, what happens is you release

all this excess starch and that's why your rice starts

to break and turn mushy.

After 10 minutes, shut the flame off and let it sit

for another 10 to 15 minutes to completely absorb

all that liquid.

And then finally, if you were patient and you didn't touch

anything, when you open it up, you should have perfect rice.

So those are all the questions for today.

Thank you so much.

I love it when people ask questions like this,

because it means you're thinking and you're using your brain

while you're cooking, and you're not just following

the recipe, you're trying to get out there and experiment

and I love that.

Thanks for watching Cooking Support.

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