A specialty of southwest France, confit is steeped in tradition. It was developed for very practical purposes – preserving meat before the advent of refrigeration. The preserving aspect is no longer relevant, but confits are still prepared for their succulence and flavours. Harold McGee describes how intertwined foods and preparations can be. He suggests that
Plant material mainly consists of water held in a cell whose wall is strengthened by pectin, with the walls of adjacent cells bonded together by pectin and hemicellulose. Cooking involves softening the cell walls, and breaking down the glue between cells. This occurs across a range of temperatures, and softening progresses with time. Temperature is
Glasses are at a transition point between a solid, which has an ordered interlocked arrangement, and a liquid, whose constituents are free to flow around each other (however painstakingly). For lack of a better description, a glass is an amorphous solid whose constituent particles are jammed together and cannot easily flow, but that does not
Not immersive as in a sous vide water bath. From a craft steeped in tradition, modern cooking has realized how many possibilities there really are when you look. One of the more novel aspects has been the deliberate manipulation of multisensory experience – the 6th sense as Ferran described it – a sense beyond the
Precision temperature sous vide can superbly cook delicate proteins like salmon and chicken breast. However, the method can also optimize the cooking of tough cuts making them tender and succulent. Meat can be thought of as muscle fibres made up of protein strands bundled together and encased in collagen sheaths for support. In land-dwelling animals,