Size Matters

Size Matters

Posted by Loulou on Apr 25, 2015 | 6 comments

Really? Yes, really.

Well, I’m actually talking about food here and maybe I haven’t covered this before except cursorily, whatever that means, but when I help in the kitchen, I am instructed to cut vegetables for soup, say, or for a stew, into small increments so that there is more surface area to volume ratio.

That means that what you want to do in order to extract the best taste out of an ingredient is to keep your ingredients smaller in relation to their surface area rather than larger.

Small pieces of artichoke instead of larger ones will crisp on the surface and still be soft in the middle.

Here is a perfect example. A ball, a sphere, is the largest surface area that an contain what is inside it. A meatball, say. And if you flatten that meatball little by little, you are creating more and more surface area and will end up, depending on where you stop flattening, with a hamburger patty. And if you kept going, flatter and flatter, you would eventually have infinite surface area.

But we want to stop before that. A sphere of mashed potatoes, for example, cooked on all sides, is not half as interesting and tasty as a potato pancake, with more surface touching the olive oil or butter, making it nice and crispy on the outside in relation to what’s inside, whereas a ball of mashed potato does not have enough crispy outside to go with the mushy inside.

Nice…

…but nicer, in mama’s opinion.

More surface area in relation to the actual size of the piece of meat or chicken or vegetable that hits the grill or the pan will give you tastier food.

A lot of recipes for tarte Tatin, for example, say “cut apples into quarters, or eighths, and then make the tarte”, whereas mama cuts the apples with one of those great French apple cutters that does it all for you—peels, cores, and slices—and she lays the slices bubbling butter in an oven-proof pan and adds sugar to caramelize the apples, then covers that with the pastry dough and bakes the tarte. The result is an intense dessert in which the apples do not seem steamed or boiled as they do in some apple tarts.

You stick the apple on and start turning the crank…peels, cores and slices!

Cut small and thin, caramelized, and crispy

But hey, it’s a choice. There are tartes Tatin and there are tartes Tatin. And there are stews with big old pieces of meat and vegetable in them and there are those with nice little bite-size ingredients that have released more flavor during the cooking.

For me, I prefer nice little tender bites of things because I don’t want to have to fight that whole chicken carcass they left on the table. I wouldn’t have enough time to destroy it before they come for me!