Marlene Parrish - What Einstein Told His Cook 2

Well, help is at hand, so to speak, for the rest of you. Never mind those how-to-hold-your-chopsticks instructions that are printed on the place mats but which might as well be in Chinese for all the help they give. There really is an easy way to eat Chinese and Japanese food with aplomb, or even without the plum.

The secret to chopstick savoir faire is a simple little rubber band. With it, you can transform those infernal wooden shafts into a tool that can be used efficiently by even the most digitally challenged klutz.

I would love to say that I discovered this secret while traveling through the Far East several years ago, but I didn’t. On that trip I could only watch with amusement as my fellow Americans attempted more maneuvers than in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War in an effort to convey perhaps every fifth morsel of food to the general vicinity of their oral cavities.

In China and Taiwan, I observed some of my desperate companions holding the sticks about an inch from the bottom, in the mistaken belief that less leverage would make them more controllable. (It doesn’t.) In Japan, the chopsticks were often pointed, so stabbing quickly became the method of choice. And watching my fork-facile friends deal with wet noodles was more fun than SeaWorld.

I’ll never know why the rubber-band trick didn’t occur to me on that trip. I had to wait until a server in a Samurai Japanese Steak House, right here in the USA, showed me how to do it. (See “How to use chopsticks, though American,” on the following page.)

THE FOODIE’S FICTIONARY:Paella—Spanish for “payola.” There’s something in it for everyone.

How to use chopsticks, though American

Remove the chopsticks from their paper wrapper through one end, leaving the wrapper intact. Flatten the wrapper and then roll it up until it resembles a miniature roll of paper towels. Hold the sticks parallel to each other, and insert the paper roll crosswise between them, about an inch or so from their top ends. Still holding the sticks together, wrap a rubber band around and around their top ends above the paper roll. Just before you run out of rubber band, take a turn or two around the protruding ends of the paper roll to keep it from slipping down the sticks. Now let go.

An easy way to use chopsticks.

Voilà!(or its Chinese equivalent). You now have a pair of spring-loaded tweezers that you can hold pretty much like a pencil. Just push the sticks together with your thumb and forefinger to grab any morsel you hanker for. When the food arrives within mouth range, release the pressure and the sticks will spring open, ready for their next trip to the plate.

The next time you go to a Chinese or Japanese restaurant, take along a rubber band. You’ll really impress that snob (me?) at the next table.

ASK UNCLE BEN

A recipe tells me to add parboiled rice to a casserole. How does one make parboiled rice?

Parboil it.

Okay, seriously: Parboiling is boiling a food just enough to cook it partially but not completely. Quixotically, the word comes from the Latin per bullire , meaning to boil thoroughly, but in Middle English per became par and was confused with part or partial . Thus, “thorough boiling” came to mean its opposite, “partial boiling.”

When you’re cooking a casserole that contains rice along with faster-cooking ingredients, the recipe may tell you to parboil the rice first so that everything will be done at the same time.

As rice comes from the field, its grains are encased in an inedible, protective hull or husk, which is removed at the mill. Beneath the husk is a thin layer of bran, which is left on for brown rice or removed by abrasion to make white rice. The bran layer gives brown rice its characteristic tan color and nutty flavor. Brown rice is chewier than white rice and takes longer to cook.

Before the hulls are removed, rice is often treated with high-pressure steam, a treatment that rice millers call parboiling. Besides softening the hull, the steam forces nutrients from the bran into the starchy white grains or endosperm, but it doesn’t qualify as parboiling in the timesaving kitchen sense; the rice is still “raw” and may even take more time to cook than non-parboiled rice.

By the way, in case you’ve also wondered what “converted” rice is, it’s Uncle Ben’s trademark for factory-parboiled rice. “Quick” or “instant” rice is rice that has been fully cooked and then dried, for people who are really in a hurry.

THE FOODIE’S FICTIONARY:Parboil—what a golfer does when his opponent makes par

FLOUR POWER

How does bleached flour differ from unbleached flour? And why does unbleached flour cost more than bleached flour? They’re charging me extra for not bleaching it?

Wheat flour is naturally slightly yellowish because it contains carotenoid pigments, natural yellow and orange compounds found in many fruits, vegetables, and grains. (Carrots’ famous orange color, carotene, is the mother of them all.) But most people are less color-tolerant than you and don’t like their flour to be yellow. The major exception is the semolina flour used in making pasta. Although it contains even more carotenoid pigment than other wheat flours, it isn’t usually bleached. Pasta that is slightly yellow, with its implication of eggy richness, is more appealing than if it were dead white.

If given half a chance, though, flour bleaches itself. That is, as it ages in contact with air, the pigments are oxidized and transformed into colorless compounds. But aging requires storage time, and time is money. That’s why “unbleached”—meaning naturally self-bleached during storage—flour costs more.

Flour millers can simulate the effects of aging by adding an oxidizing agent such as potassium bromate (in which case the flour is said to be bromated), or chlorine dioxide, or benzoyl (BEN-zo-eel) peroxide. The bleaching of flour isn’t mere cosmetics. Flour that has been matured , either by natural aging or by being treated with oxidizing agents, makes doughs that produce finer-grained, higher-volume bread and a dough that bakers report as being more elastic during kneading. That’s because oxidation not only removes the yellow color of flour but removes certain sulfur-containing chemicals ( thiols ) that interfere with the formation of gluten, the sticky, elastic protein in dough that traps gas bubbles and gives bread its light texture.

Some people are concerned about the intimidating names and properties of the bleaching chemicals. But after doing their jobs they are gone, having been chemically transformed into harmless substances. Chlorine dioxide is a gas that dissipates, so there is none of it left in the flour. And any excess of benzoyl peroxide would decompose in the heat of an oven.

After reacting with the carotenoids and thiols in the flour, the 50 or 75 parts per million of added potassium bromate turn into potassium bromide, a perfectly harmless salt. For most of the eighty-plus years of bakers’ use of potassium bromate, no one was able to detect any residual excess bromate in baked goods. However, chemists today have such sensitive analytical methods—down to billionths of a gram in many cases—that extremely low levels of residual bromate can be detected in baked goods made with bromated flour. Analytical detection instruments are so sensitive these days that they can find traces of almost any given chemical in almost anything, a fact that much of the public doesn’t understand. A finding that a certain food “contains toxic XYZ” often generates unfounded fears. But everything is toxic in large enough amounts and harmless in small enough amounts.