JUST ADD WATER - Bee Wilson 🌞

JUST ADD WATER



‘People who habitually drink water become just as
good gourmets about water as wine drinkers about
wine.’
Alexandre Dumas, Dumas on Food

What is the single most overlooked element in cooking? I’d argue it is
neither heat nor salt but water. No other ingredient can do so much, while
costing so little. Water is the surprise component that can transform textures
and lighten flavours like nothing else, once you know how. ‘Our culture
frowns on cooking in water,’ states the food writer Tamar Adler, lamenting
the tendency to sneer at boiled vegetables, which can be perfectly delicious.
She’s right. But it’s also true that water is so much more than just a cooking
medium. The real secret of water is all the other things it can do, including
– most surprising of all – making food taste better. There is a traditional
Tuscan soup called acquacotta: cooked water. It is a bread-based peasant
soup in which stale bread, tomatoes, onions and olive oil are turned into a
frugal feast thanks to the addition of water.

Water is what turns unpromising burned pan drippings into a rich gravy;
it can make radishes crunchier and raisins plumper. Warm water is what
stops a pasta sauce from turning claggy and what smooths the sharpness in
a vinaigrette. A bath of cold water can revive drooping greens and prevent
hard-boiled eggs from over-cooking; a dash of ice water can add silkiness to
houmous and help prevent pastry from becoming greasy, among countless
other uses. When you worry that you have overseasoned a sauce, just a few
drops of water can bring it back into balance again, lightening both the
texture and the seasoning. Yet most of the time, we treat water as if it were
nothing: a mere blank.

One of the daunting things about cooking is the sense that once you have
messed something up, there is no way back. But if anything can give you a
second chance to make a dish wonderful, water can. There have been times–
more than I care to remember – when I’ve undercalculated the ratio of
water to rice when using the absorption method, leaving me with a pan of
crunchy and undercooked grains. Then, one evening, instead of berating
myself for the failure, I looked at the pot of rice with curiosity: what would
happen, I wondered, if I sprinkled on a few drops of water and put the pan
back on a low heat for a few minutes before leaving it to stand for a few
minutes more? Perfectly good rice, that’s what happened.

Water, I’ve come to realise, is often all you need to pull a dish back from
the brink of disappointment. When the tomato sauce for your pasta has
reduced so far that the tomatoes stick to the edge of the pan like jam, do not
despair. Simply add half a cup of water or so and the sauce will ease itself
back to the right texture. Two teaspoons of warm water can save you from
the panic of a broken mayonnaise or hollandaise (which is one of those
things that only seems to happen when you are trying to make the
mayonnaise or hollandaise for a special occasion and therefore really mind
about it). You stare at the greasy mess of broken mayonnaise thinking
‘nothing will fix this’ only to see it make a mockery of your pessimism by
recombining into a creamy mass as you slowly whisk in the warm water
using a balloon whisk. The crucial thing here is not to overdo it. Add too
much water and your mayonnaise will be, well, watery.

Perhaps we should not be surprised that water has such a range of
culinary powers given that raw ingredients – like the human body – are
mostly water. There are certain ingredients such as cucumber and melon
which consist of more than 90 per cent water and whose refreshing
wateriness is obvious but even something like an egg or a chicken breast is
more than 70 per cent water. Cheese, I was surprised to learn, is around 37
per cent water (depending on the type of cheese). Even a packet of pasta,
which seems as dry as a bone, is still 12 per cent water. If you want to find a
food devoid of water, your best chance is to look to oil, water’s arch enemy.
Olive oil – which is a hygrophobic or water-repelling substance – is one of
the few commonly used ingredients which contains not so much as a drop
of water.

Cooking, in a sense, is the art of getting food to the perfect degree of
moisture. Sometimes, as when roasting meat or sautéing mushrooms, it is a
case of concentrating flavour by allowing heat to drive off some of the
ingredient’s water. But there are other times when you want to use water to
moisten or remoisten something. In old French haute cuisine, there was a
term mouiller, which meant to moisten ingredients with water or stock prior
to cooking. In Judy Rodgers’s legendary chicken and bread salad from The
Zuni Café Cookbook, the croutons in the salad are dribbled with chicken
stock or lightly salted water just before serving. That salty water not only
seasons the croutons but gives them a crucial element of sogginess around
the edge.

Giving food a water bath before you cook or eat it can surprisingly
improve both flavour and texture. I have made oven fries many times but
was never quite satisfied until I came across a very specialist cookbook
called Veggie Burgers Every Which Way by Lukas Volger. He notes that
oven fries have a tendency to be ‘over-cooked on the outside and dry and
starchy like cotton on the inside’. His answer is to soak the peeled and cut
potatoes in cold water for half an hour before drying, tossing with oil and
salt and baking on a tray in a hot oven for 40 minutes. This quick water bath
removes some of the starch from the potatoes and as a result they taste
much more like the true deep-fried fries you get in restaurants. If it helps,
you can leave the cut potatoes in the water in the fridge for up to 12 hours.

By the way, a second trick when making oven fries which has nothing to do
with water but is worth knowing anyway is to sprinkle the potatoes with a
handful of polenta before baking. This amplifies the crunch in a delightful
way, like Nigella’s tip of adding semolina to roast potatoes.
Water baths can work to boost flavour as well as texture if you add salt
and other seasonings to the water. As Nik Sharma notes in The Flavor
Equation, ‘water is called a universal solvent because more ingredients can
dissolve in it than any other liquid, by far’. Most obviously, you can
dissolve salt in water and use this simple brine to pre-season most kinds of
meat or vegetables before they are roasted or pan-cooked or barbecued. The
most famous example of this is using a wet brine on a Thanksgiving or
Christmas turkey, but actually this is one of the few times I avoid using a
brine because, although it makes the meat wonderfully juicy, I find it makes
the gravy too salty and serving the people I love bad gravy, I am
embarrassed to admit, is one of the things that can reduce me to tears. I
would rather save the brine for less high-pressure meals and use it on
smaller cuts of meat such as pork chops and chicken thighs, in which case a
good brine mix is 6 cups of water to 3 tablespoons of salt, plus a big sprig
of rosemary if you like, and perhaps some bay leaves and juniper berries for
the pork.

Stir until the salt is dissolved. Brine the meat in a bowl in the fridge for 12
hours or more before you roast it in the oven or pan-sear it in a
frying pan. The same brine works well with thick slices of red peppers,
onions and courgettes, which need a much quicker soaking. After 15
minutes, you can remove the vegetables from the brine, brush them with
olive oil and cook them for a few minutes over a hot griddle or barbecue. It
sounds like an odd thing to do to vegetables but when I can be bothered to
do it, this brine-bath seems to make them cook quicker as well as making
them seasoned, through and through.

Another quality that water has is to revive foods Lazarus-like that seem
long past saving. If you have a loaf or baguette in your bread bin which is
rock hard, assuming it isn’t actually mouldy, you can run it under the tap
and stick it in an oven preheated to 200°C fan, direct on the oven shelf, for
about 10 minutes. Don’t be scared to get the bread good and wet. You may
fear for a moment that you have turned the loaf into a wet sponge yet it will
emerge almost as good and crusty as the day you bought it. The water turns
to steam in the oven, which makes the crumb moist again, while the heat of
the oven gives the crust a second chance at crustiness.

Water – in the form of a cold water bath – can also give new life to raw
vegetables, making crisp vegetables crisper and un-drooping droopy leaves.
This kitchen practice seems to be more common among Japanese cooks
than in the West. The original rationale for the water bath was to freshen up
withered greens at a time when no one had fridges, as well as washing off
any stray insects and pieces of soil. But the trick still works. If you have a
sad head of lettuce that is almost too saggy to enjoy, it will become
dramatically crisper after just half an hour of soaking in cold water. Then
spin well in a salad spinner because for all water’s virtues, you don’t want
wet salad leaves, which will repel the dressing.

Water is often treated as a problem in the kitchen: something to be
removed or evaporated away. We press water out of tofu before we fry it
and wring the moisture out of a panful of wilted spinach before adding
cream. We toss berries in cornflour before adding them to a crisp or
crumble so that their juices are not too watery. We remove the water-logged
seeds from a cucumber with a spoon and toss the diced pieces in salt to
concentrate the flavour.

But sometimes, as surprising as it may seem, water is the only ingredient
that will do. ‘Just add water’, as it says on packets of dried soup mix.
Writing about texture, food scientists Ole G. Mouritsen and Klavs Styrbaek
note that ‘The unique properties of water have an indirect but extremely
vital role in shaping the mouthfeel of food.’ Water is your best bet when
you want to bring something down a notch, whether in flavour or texture.
There are moments in life – whether working, or cooking, or doing yoga,
or trying to meet your one true love – when you are straining to achieve
more and more when what you actually need is to breathe, stop and do less.

A case in point is vinaigrette, which, even when you have good oil, can
easily get too intense: too intensely thick and oily on the tongue and so salty
and sharp in flavour that it makes you wince. For years I felt dissatisfied
with my vinaigrette, which I felt could never measure up to that of my
mother-in-law. The more unhappy I was with my salads, the worse they
became. I was forcing things. I tried adding more mustard, more salt, more
vinegar, more everything. I made vinaigrettes that were intensely garlicky
and others that were so salty they almost blew my head off. I watched my
mother-in-law make her dressing by eye one day and saw that she added a
bit of sugar. For a while after that, my vinaigrettes became so sugary and
cloying that you could eat them for dessert. Then, one day, I don’t know
why, I stopped trying to make the dressing more intense and instead tried
adding a dash of water. The effect was extraordinary and immediate. It was
as if all the harsh lines had been softly blurred and replaced with calming
Impressionist brush strokes. The emulsified vinaigrette was now both
velvety in texture and balanced in taste. A few years later, I was thrilled to
read in the New York Times in 2019 that Samin Nosrat does the same thing,
following a recipe from the West Village restaurant Via Carota, where the
chef Jody Williams taught her to soften the harshness of vinegar with a little
warm water.

Samin Nosrat explains that she had always thought of water as ‘the
enemy of vinaigrette – why would I want to dilute flavour?’ Yet she
discovered that just a spoonful of warm water was the missing element that
could make a dressing so smooth you will want to drink it.

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

Thank you Bee!