So you think you know everything about cooking? Think again. It’s OK if everyone doesn’t know how to prepare a blowfish, or how to pair the right wine with the right dinner. You’re not a master chef by any means, but you still know a few basic food truths, right? Wrong again!
Bread gets stale because it loses its moisture
When your loaf becomes stale, it’s not because it’s dried out. When bread gets too much moisture, the starches in the bread start to crystallize, making the bread tough and crumbly. It also doesn’t help if you keep the bread in the refrigerator. Low temperatures actually help to speed up the crystallization process.
A crayfish screams when boiled
You’ve been told your whole life that crayfishes scream when you boil them. The truth is they don’t. That sound you hear is actually steam escaping the lobster’s shell. When you toss a crayfish into a pot of boiling water, steam builds up in the recesses of its shell and it has nowhere to go but out, much like a tea kettle. A delicious, expensive tea kettle. The crayfish is not even pissed off with you, because its nervous system isn’t very complex, so it’s feeling little to no pain.
Searing meat seals in moisture
Your steak has been marinating for 48 hours and somehow you need to preserve those juices. How do you do that? Well, because you’re cultured, you know that searing is the best way to preserve juices, a tip you learned from Master Chef SA. Not by a long shot. Searing meat doesn’t do anything to keep juices inside. When you sear your steak, you’re actually creating a tougher crust on the outside of the cut, which just makes the inside seem juicier by comparison. Renowned chef and food scientist Alton Brown busted this myth and found that searing meat causes it to lose more moisture than meat that hasn’t been seared.
Alcohol completely evaporates when cooked in food
Penne with vodka sauce. Chicken Marsala. Rum cake. We never get drunk and we are feeding it to our children. It is gone, right? Depending on the method of cooking, the heat and the time the food is left sitting, up to 85 percent of the alcohol can remain. Even if the alcohol is put into boiling water, it can still retain its intoxicating qualities. For alcohol to completely cook out of food, it needs to be cooked for up to three hours. Go ahead and look online; you will not find a single recipe for vodka sauce, Marsala wine sauce or rum cake that suggests you cook for three freaking hours. Unless you cook your beer-battered onion rings for three cool hours, you’ll be ever so slightly on your way to a nice buzz.
Cooking Vegetables Makes Them Less Nutritious
By this point in the article, you’re probably just fed up with cooking in general. You don’t even know what to believe anymore. So you decide you’re just not going to cook from now on. Raw food, all day. Why? It’s healthy. Cooking vegetables causes their enzymes to die. You’d get more nutrients if you printed out this article and ate it…It turns out that when you eat raw vegetables, even though their enzymes are intact, they dissolve and get washed away in your digestive acids. The thing is, the enzymes in plants are what helps them grow; they’re not needed by humans because we have digestive enzymes of our own, rendering plant enzymes pretty useless.
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