The world of cooking is made up of received ideas: So you may have already heard that you should not eat closed clams, that you should not wash mushrooms or that you should only salt legumes at the end of cooking. Know that all this is not true, replies the Guardian.
“Forget what you learned on your mother’s lap, what’s on the package, or what you once heard a chef say on ‘Saturday Kitchen’ [une émission de cuisine de la BBC, ndlr]», writes Felicity Cloake, the journalist from the Guardian. She returns to culinary rules that you can safely ignore.
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Pasta water and chilli seeds
The first piece of advice is about the salt level in the pasta water. Some culinary writers say this water should be as salty as the sea. “If you’ve ever had a wave in your face, you know that the salt content is way too high for human consumption”, tempers Felicity Cloake, who points out that the same authors are simply wrong about the salt level of the sea (which is about thirty grams per liter). However, they are not wrong about how to prepare pasta: 10 grams per liter, for example, is the rate recommended by star chef Giorgio Locatelli.
The British newspaper then returns to a very tenacious idea: mushrooms should not be washed, because that would make them soft and soaked. On the contrary, the added moisture is an asset to these foods. “While the mushrooms drain their water, they do not absorb oil. When the cooking stops, they have already shrunk and are therefore not as porous as raw mushrooms.notes Dave Arnold of the International Culinary Center.
Another misconception dismantled by the Guardian: chilli seeds are responsible for the spiciness of this food and they should therefore be removed as carefully as possible. This is wrong again: the spicy side actually comes from the white membrane that binds the seeds to the flesh of the pepper.
Open the forms
Have you ever been told that it is important not to salt the legumes at the beginning of their cooking in the pot? The argument is that the salt would remove the moisture from these foods and make them hard. If it is true that this spice reduces the rate at which legumes absorb water, food writer Harold McGee writes in his book About food and cooking that the pulses continue to soften, even with salt. So nothing to worry about.
Finally, let’s move on to the clams. You have surely heard one day that they should not be eaten if they are closed. Please note that this recommendation is not universal. “Any clam that can be opened easily is safe to eat”says Felicity Cloake.
Only molluscs with a broken shell or already opened before cooking should be examined more carefully: If they do not close when tapped, they are probably dead and you can get rid of them. And don’t worry about coming across a spoiled clam: according to Spanish food blogger Harley Gutiérrez, these smell “degrading meat and seafood”. She wanted to be so strong that he wanted to be “difficult to approach”.
