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How are Kosher salt, sea salt and regular
salt different and how do each effect cooking? Why is it that
bread flour performs differently from other flours?
Are your cookies crumbly? Shirley will tell you why
and explain in clear terms how
to use each ingredient to its best purpose.
For instance, her answer to your cookie
problem lies in the gluten. In an interview she gave to the
Institute of Culinary Education,
she explains:
"Gluten holds baked goods together, but
cookies have a lot of fat, and all that fat greases up the flour
so that the protein strands can't possibly grab each other. And
then you have all that sugar, and sugar infers with gluten
formation as well. So, if you don't want a cookie to be too
crumbly, you need to start by mixing water and flour together
first, to form the gluten, before adding the sugar and fat."
Shirley Corriher began her unlikely journey into cooking as a
lab chemist at Vanderbilt University Medical School.
She then started a boarding school with her former husband, and
got her first taste of serious cooking when she prepared 3 meals a
day for 140 ravenous boys. Finding herself broke after a
divorce, with 3 children to raise, she found a minimum wage job
doing cleaning and set-up for a French cooking teacher. Her
chemist's application to cooking mysteries soon gained the
attention of the teacher, and the rest as they say, is history.
The greatest chefs in the country are the first to turn to
Shirley when stumped with a cooking dilemma, so there is certainly
no reason for you not to do the same. For instance,
never cook green vegetables over 7 minutes in order to retain the
color. And, soak your fresh vegetables in cold water, pat dry,
and then put in baggies to keep them crisper longer.
Here are a few places to find tips from Shirley:
http://splendidtable.publicradio.org/souptonuts/science.html
http://www.chemheritage.org/women_chemistry/food/corriher.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92421142
http://www.chefsline.com/blog/podcasts/kitchen-secrets-revealed-with-shirley-o-corriher/print/
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