Over the years, I have written many articles on how to cook. Most people who like food can’t help but do it themselves, which I call “feeding by selling”. After publishing the articles, I also secretly tracked readers’ feedback to see if the articles really helped them. It turns out that many of the less successful cooks were discussing two words: fire.
The word “fire” is arguably the most esoteric concept in Chinese cuisine. The same ingredients, the same cooking process, the last thing that makes a dish break through the ordinary to reach the gourmet side is the fire. However, on the other hand, it is also easy to attribute all difficult dishes to a poor grasp of fire. So, there are so many people keen to discuss the fire when cooking, it means that there are so many people who simply do not know how to cook.
For beginners who do not know how to cook, just to get the dish cooked level, should not discuss what the fire.
The biggest question for beginners is: Why is my cooking not good? If you look deeper, their real question is: Why can’t I make a good dish by following the recipe? The reason is the problem of reading comprehension, teaching and learning are always a contradiction, whether the professor can make the learner fully understand and practice the same results, this is professional work. Otherwise, there is no Blue Sky Technical School and driving school instructor in this world. And how difficult is the communication between humans!
The recipe says “stir-fry for 3 minutes on high heat”, please ask, what is meant by “high heat”, how big is called big? Two chefs each stir-fry on high heat, and their high heat is the same temperature? Both took 3 minutes? Obviously not so. This Chinese cooking art is not as good as Chinese tea art, tea art to see whether the water is appropriate, there are crab eyes, fish eyes, boiling waves bulging distinction, you can use a very intuitive way to observe the size of the bubbles, thus determining whether the water temperature is appropriate. And the Chinese culinary arts say large, small, medium and large fire, as well as broken green, broken raw, discoloration, slightly charred, etc., in fact, it is difficult to use as a valid observation reference. Only fried sugar is one of the few exceptions, said the icing sugar will break, it will indeed break; said the icing sugar will turn into coffee-colored liquid, it will indeed sink in the oil below the coffee-colored mass; said the icing sugar will foam, it will indeed tumble up in the frying pan dark brown foam. You see so, naturally know whether it is the most appropriate time.
Observable, verifiable, natural can learn; unobservable, unverifiable, natural will be trapped in endless speculation. What kind of natural talent is it to be able to see the fire in a recipe?
For beginners, it is not the fire that matters, but the experience. The experience of handling ingredients, the experience of cooking ingredients. If you are not familiar with the ingredients and don’t know what will happen to them in the pot, what kind of fire is it? In this case, the ingredients are like untamed wild horses, so how can the beginner master them? The occasional success or two is just a matter of luck, not skill. With the written guidance of the recipe, trying to tame a wild horse, is this not the idiom of “follow the map”?
So where does the experience of cooking come from? It comes from waste. Many people who are beginners try to make a good dish out of their hands, which is delusional. With the intention of making a good dish, one becomes a master of winning and losing, measuring the process by the final result. When a dish is not done well, then one gets frustrated and desperate, and goes back to meditate to meditate on the right fire. In fact, the most important thing at this stage is to go to waste! Burning paste, sandwiched, over-salted, tasteless, discolored, etc., etc., are all things that can happen. But removing these results and squatting in front of the trash can to think back on the process is the most valuable part of the cooking process. Because the failure of the results all point to the mistakes in the cooking process, and these mistakes can deepen their understanding of the ingredients, so they can know a lot of “this is not to do “. The more you know, the deeper your understanding of the ingredients will be.
The reason many people can’t steam a bowl of egg custard well is that they try too hard to steam a good bowl of egg custard. If you don’t think that way, but put the egg custard on the fire and steam it, and make up your mind to go to waste: 2 minutes to take it out and taste it, you know it’s not steamed enough; 5 minutes to take it out and taste it, you know it’s almost steamed; 10 minutes to take it out and taste it again, you know it’s a little old; 20 minutes to take it out and taste it again, you know it’s too old to eat. Yes, the bowl of egg custard can only be poured in the end, but in this process, you can learn a lot of things. Whether the heat is high or low, you define it yourself, you have your habits, and it doesn’t matter at all. What matters is that you learn how the egg custard will change over time when cooked at the heat you are used to. Even if you don’t read any recipes, after steaming a bowl of egg custard, you can quickly learn your own heat: you know that the time is between 5 and 10 minutes, and that there must be an optimal time to get a bowl of tender egg custard.
Similarly, you take a green vegetable and sacrifice it, throwing the whole thing in a pot of boiling water and boiling it in plain water. Then, you know that if you force it to cook that way, it will be cooked in the end; you take two more plants and cook them once with the lid on and once with the pot on. Then, you know that covered with the lid cooked quickly, but the dish will change color, open pot cooked slowly, but the dish will not change color …… waste of four plants can let you know the mystery of cooking vegetable soup, because you know its physical properties, know the different reactions of this physical properties in different cooking techniques. Then, naturally, you also know how long to cook it, the soup turns turquoise, but the vegetables do not become soft and full of taste. You don’t have a precise concept of time, but you know in your heart of hearts that you can cook the effect you want, or rather, the effect you think is delicious.
As you keep wasting like this, you also keep gaining experience, and moreover keep accumulating operational proficiency, you will find yourself making dishes that will play more and more consistently, and you will know during the cooking process what the end result will probably be like; you will know how to cook with the ingredients and how much time to cook them before cooking, when you get them. At this point, when someone asks you for advice on how to make a certain dish, you will tell them from the bottom of your heart: first stir-fry on high heat for 3 minutes, then turn down the heat ……
Because you are a normal human being, normal human beings forget how they got all the way to where they are now, forgetting that the process of accumulating experience is the basis for all of this today. A normal human being will generalize and summarize the method and think that by following it, they will get the exact same result. This is the reason why recipes don’t work, and this is why everyone loves to talk about fire.
Has anyone really mastered fire by learning about it? No. No one. Everyone learns by failing, learning to understand the ingredients and learning the effects of different cooking styles. With this understanding, you don’t ask for the fire but the fire appears naturally, because in a lot of failures, you have learned when and how to open the narrow door to success. This is what others seem, even in your own look, is the mastery of the fire performance. But, where is the legendary fire?
The so-called fire, said the cooking is just right. The so-called suitable, is the only way you try out of the many unsuitable.
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