CRUNCH! - Bee Wilson 🌞

CRUNCH

‘There is also the biting touch. If biting an apple,
no matter how strong your teeth are, they are
nevertheless alive with sensitive nerves’.
Jean Conil, Haute Cuisine, 1953

One of the most neglected aspects of eating – and therefore cooking – is
texture. When you ask a child why they like or dislike a certain food, nine
times out of ten the reason will be texture. Maybe they hate mushrooms
because they are so slimy or they love cherry tomatoes because every time
they pop one in their mouth, they get a tiny explosion of juice and seeds.
Adults, too, are hugely driven by texture when it comes to food. Whether
someone loves polenta or porridge, for example, is very little to do with the
starchy flavours and a great deal to do with that creamy gelatinous texture
which some of us adore and others can’t abide. Yet Western cookbooks are
often strangely silent on the question of texture in contrast to flavour.
There aren’t many universals when it comes to human taste – other than
the fact that all babies are born with a love of sweetness and an aversion to
bitterness – but one thing that practically everyone seems to relish in one
form or another are foods that are crunchy (assuming that you have a robust
set of teeth).

The single most frequently used word for texture in the US is ‘crisp’,
according to scientists Ole G. Mouritsen and Klavs Styrbaek in their book
Mouthfeel: How Texture Makes Taste. But crispness can actually mean
many different things. The crispness that you get when you bite into a juicy
apple is different from the crackling crunch of a good piece of bread fresh
from the oven, which is different again from the fatty crispness of a piece of
roast chicken skin or the shattering crispness of a sheet of peanut or sesame
brittle. What all these forms of crispness have in common is that they make
a loud sound when your jaws bite into them and that they are deeply appealing.
The loudness of the crunch is a big part of the appeal because it
keeps things interesting with each mouthful.

I’m not claiming that crunch is always the answer. Sometimes, you are
feeling low and want a meal that is nothing but silent softness. When I have
a sore throat or a toothache or am just feeling in need of cosseting, I find
myself gravitating towards foods with the unchallenging textures of baby
food. Vegetable purées. Bananas covered in custard. Squishy raspberries
and cream. A pillowy piece of brioche dipped in a mug of milky coffee.
Chicken noodle soup. Irish colcannon potatoes drenched in melted butter. A
bowl of soothing congee (rice porridge). Fish pie so soft you can eat it with
a spoon.

But in most moods, the quickest way to make any meal more exciting is
to give it a bit of crunch. When you add crispiness to softness, your mouth
is constantly wondering what will come next. What makes Persian rice so
dreamy is the crispy bottom – or tahdig – formed at the bottom of the pot.
Equally, the thrill of a good Caesar salad is largely in the staccato crunch of
the croutons which amplify the quieter crispness of the romaine lettuce. A
handful of granola offers crunchy delight to a bowl of soft Greek yoghurt
and berries. If you have no granola, you could try popping some quinoa for
an instant form of crunch that is good both on yoghurt and in salads. This
surprised me at first, because I didn’t know you could eat toasted quinoa
without boiling it first. Simply heat a spoonful of quinoa in a small frying
pan over a medium heat until it pops, then quickly scatter it over the
yoghurt and top with a chopped apple or pear, a drizzle of maple syrup and
a handful of chopped Brazil nuts or almonds with a tiny grating of orange
zest.

Or consider what crunch can bring to macaroni cheese. This is lovely
enough by itself: the soothing dairy richness of cheese combining with the
soporific carbs of the pasta. But you can take macaroni cheese to a whole
other level simply by adding breadcrumbs or cracker crumbs to the top
before you bake it. When I say breadcrumbs, this doesn’t need to be any
more complicated than cutting or tearing up a couple of slices of good bread
such as sourdough that is old but not positively stale.

As with acidity, crunch is something that most experienced cooks
consider automatically, without necessarily advertising the fact. I recently
went through one of my favourite cookbooks by Diana Henry – From the
Oven to the Table – and noticed that the whole book was full of little grace
notes involving crunch. A tray of chilli-roasted tomatoes with feta and dill
is topped with pistachio nuts. Roast cabbage wedges are sprinkled with rye
breadcrumbs. A salad of chicken and bitter leaves are cheered up with the
waxy crunch of pine nuts plus the heftier crunch of torn sourdough.
How can you get more crunch in your meals? Let me count the ways.
Crispy bacon is one: crumbled over a spinach salad or alongside soft
scrambled eggs for weekend breakfast. Raw vegetables are another. There’s
something to be said for the old French tradition of eating crudités at the
start of a meal to satisfy your thirst for crunch. Radishes are an obvious
choice but raw sugarsnaps are sweet and satisfying in the summer, like little
green boats. When you are serving vegetables in a cooked form that makes
them very soft, consider holding back a little of the vegetable to add raw,
finely shredded, over the top, perhaps tossed in oil and lemon. Example: a
bit of raw crunchy fennel thinly sliced is the one of the best things to add to
slow-cooked roasted fennel. By the same token, cauliflower florets sliced
paper-thin look like crisp little flowers on top of a cream of cauliflower
soup.

Croutons of all kinds are another source of crunch. The laziest way is
simply to make a few slices of toast in the toaster and then cut them into
cubes. Sometimes, I rub the slices with garlic and sprinkle them with oil
and a little salt before I cut them. These simplified croutons are good tossed
in any kind of salad. It is hardly more trouble to fry croutons in butter. To
50g of butter melted in a shallow pan, add a cup or so of torn bread and
cook until both butter and bread smell toasty but not burned – around 4
minutes. The ideal crouton is crisp and crunchy on the outside but still with
a little softness on the inside.
You can create a crunchier and finer crumb with a handful of Japanese
panko breadcrumbs, which are a great pantry standby. I think of panko as
electric breadcrumbs because the bread they are baked from is made using
an electric current rather than a conventional oven. They were invented
during the Second World War as a way to conserve energy. The word panko
comes from the Japanese for bread (pan) and small pieces (ko).
When frying breadcrumbs, you might also like to add some spice to the
butter, such as cumin seeds, smoked paprika or a little finely chopped
rosemary plus chilli flakes. On the theme of croutons, don’t overlook
tortilla chips and potato chips. Carla Lalli Music writes in Where Cooking
Begins that ‘everyone should be topping more things with potato chips’
given that they are naturally gluten-free and ‘zeroeffort’. Music sprinkles
plain salted potato chips over a salad of charred leeks. If this sounds off,
remember that long before the potato chip was a commercial snack food, it
was something called a game chip, served on aristocratic tables in England:
an ethereal morsel designed to go with roasted game birds such as pheasant
and grouse. Another idea along the same lines is the Indian use of sev – or
deep-fried noodles made from gram flour – to give exciting crunch to
vegetable dishes such as aloo chana chat: potatoes with chickpeas. The
crunchy sev are what make you keep going back for mouthful after
mouthful.

Why do we love to crunch on things so much? It has been suggested that
the human love of crispy foods such as potato chips goes back all the way
to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, for whom crunchy insects were an
important source of protein. But these days, I suspect that most of us would
rather crunch on an almond than a beetle.

CRUNCHY NUTS
When I feel something needs crunch, my default move is to add some kind
of nuts or seeds. To get the best out of a nut – both taste-wise and texturewise –
you should toast them, a process that crisps up the nut’s waxiness
and makes its flavour toasty and warm.

If toasted in the oven, most nuts take 15 minutes on a parchment-lined
tray at 160°C fan, except for pine nuts and walnuts which should be done
after 10 (check pine nuts after 5 because they notoriously go from raw to
burned in almost no time). But my preferred way to deal with most nuts and
seeds is to pan-toast them with or without a little oil. It’s much more energy
efficient, they are ready in a minute, you can make them in small batches,
and the presence of the oil means that you can add extra flavours such as
spices. And because they take such a short time to cook, it’s much easier to
give them your full attention for long enough to avoid burning them.
Here are a couple of ways to get started, one savoury, one sweet, enough
for 2 people.

Pumpkin seeds fried with salt
A joy to make and to eat. I add them to every kind of salad. In a small
frying pan, combine 50g of pumpkin seeds, a teaspoon of olive oil and a big
pinch of salt. Within seconds, the seeds will start to pop and disgorge their
insides, like popcorn. The moment they have popped and smell toasty, tip
them into a bowl to arrest the cooking. You can add all sorts of flavourings
to the oil such as a teaspoon of soy, a big pinch of cumin seeds, a sour pinch
of sumac, chopped rosemary, smoked paprika.

Instant praline
Any kind of nut can be turned into a near-instant praline to eat for dessert.
This is almost absurdly easy and deeply moreish.In a small pan, heat 50g
of flaked almonds (or any other nut, chopped if
large) with 2 teaspoons of icing sugar, stirring constantly. As it melts, the
sugar will seem to vanish before your eyes. A moment later, the nuts and
the sugar will have stuck together and formed an instant praline. Tip it into
a bowl and leave to cool and harden. This is divine over plain vanilla ice
cream or thick Greek yoghurt, or added for last-minute sweetness and
crunch to almost any fruit-based dessert.

Thank you Bee!

From "The Secret of Cooking"
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77264998-the-secret-of-cooking