Kitchen Legend

There are certain fights I have with The Hub that won’t go away: milk vs. water in the scrambled eggs, searing meat does/does not seal in the juices, etc. Just because someone went to chef school, doesn’t mean he’s the universal God of kitchen knowledge. Besides, the majority of a cook’s education comes from the other guys on the line, in the trenches. And often, they’re just spewing info that some other cook told them. (In a local Italian restaurant, a cook plates three swirled mounds of Spaghetti because he’s been told that’s the traditional and authentic way of presenting the pasta. He doesn’t know that the guy who came up with menu only did it that way so that the meatballs wouldn’t slide off the plate.)

In my former life of restaurant training, one of the most important things I learned was that it is 62 million times harder to unteach a “wrong” than it is to simply teach a “right”. This makes each myth, each sensible sounding piece of lore that much harder to dislodge from someone’s stubborn head.

I ran across this page of Kitchen Myths debunked which, quite reasonably, fights my fight.

One of my favorites is the enduring myth that cold water will boil faster than warm water. I’ve actually seen cooks trying to teach other cooks this Bizarro World notion.

As for whether a gas stove is superior to an electric stove, that’s hardly a myth that can be disproved with chartable facts. It’s more about priorities and preferences and the unyielding, hard-core certainty that gas is FAR BETTER than electric.


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