Cooking Tips

Shirley O. Corriher, former biochemist, chef and author of CookWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Cooking, says that much of what happens in the kitchen is chemistry. She offers these helpful hints:

Do:

• Wash, spin-dry and seal your lettuce in heavy-duty freezer zip-top bags to keep fresh for up to a month. Squeeze as much air as possible from the bag before sealing and wrap the lettuce in paper towels. Reducing the available oxygen will slow the decay process.

• Keep your bananas away from apples and other ripe bananas to slow ripening.

• Add a little vinegar or cream of tartar when boiling potatoes or onions to prevent them from turning yellow or brown.

• Serve a perfect sauce! In starch-bound sauces, some starches don't completely thicken until right around the boiling point. Bring sauces to a gentle boil before deciding whether to add more starch.

• Beat egg whites in glass or metal bowls, not plastic, and make sure all grease is off your bowl or beaters. Egg white foam will not have good volume otherwise.

Don't:

• Overcook your cabbage. If you increase your cooking time from 5 to 7 minutes, you double the foul-smelling hydrogen sulfide gas produced. For pleasant, sweet tasting cabbage, slice it thinly and cook for 4 minutes.

• Undercook long grain rice when making rice pudding. Unlike short or medium grain rice, long grain rice must be cooked longer in order for it to exude enough starch to thicken the custard sufficiently enough to hold up the rice.

• Let the yolk of your hardboiled egg turn green on the surface. The longer eggs are cooked, the more time iron in the yolk and sulfur in the white have to combine to form this green compound. To avoid the green, watch cooking time carefully and rinse in cold water to stop the cooking.

• Let your bread get stale. Bread goes stale faster at refrigerator temperatures than at room temperature. Freeze bread or keep at room temperature.

• Serve a crumbly piecrust. A crust gets crumbly with too little gluten. To avoid, don't work fat in as well before the liquid is added.

• Serve dry cakes and muffins. This is likely the problem of too much egg white or not enough sugar.

*An American Chemistry Society release.