Fear in the Kitchen

Fear is a wall—a wall that can prevent us from reaching our goals or achieving our objectives—a wall that can prevent us from even making a simple meal. When I talk to cooking students about their home meal preparation and why they don’t wish to attempt a particular recipe or work with a certain ingredient, the answer often contains that niggling word: fear. And although I may like to believe otherwise, to the student, these fears are real. Upon examination, I’ve found that these kitchen fears often have some basis in fact, but all can be mitigated to some extent. They certainly shouldn’t prevent us from succeeding in preparing delicious meals from a variety of ingredients and from using a variety of techniques.

These fears are not usually big fears. They are not mageirocophobia, the clinically defined fear of the kitchen, but are little fears that get in the way of each one of us cooking our best or feeling comfortable while trying. These little fears won’t drive us to make regular visits to a psychiatrist’s couch, or even to attend a weekend workshop full of holding hands and singing kumbaya, but they can prevent us from being better cooks than we are already.

If I ask you to name a few cooking fears there’s probably a handful of common ones that would be on your list. The one that I hear the most often is the fear of making someone sick. This fear takes a number of different forms: there’s the fear of undercooking, the fear of bacteria, the fear of contamination, and the fear of spoilage. If one of these fears becomes a reality, someone may even get sick, but not likely.

Let’s break this group of fears into its components. We are afraid that food, especially meat, is full of parasites and bacteria so we overcook the food to “sterilize” it. But is this really necessary? Except in eggs, the bacteria that frightens us are all just on the surface. This means if you buy a steak and there happens to be some dangerous beasties on it, they will all be on the surface and the simple process of searing the steak will kill them all. The meat will be free of these critters, even if the center is still raw. Of course, if you first grind that steak into hamburger, any bacteria on the surface would be mixed into all portions of the meat and it would be necessary to cook the meat until all portions reach 72 °C (162 °F) for 15 seconds. This kills all common bacteria like salmonella. The meat can reach this temperature by means of carryover cooking. It doesn’t require 10-minute exposure to a flamethrower to be safe.

All of this assumes that the meat is contaminated in the first place. I would like to think that my butchers take precautions so that the meat they sell me is not dirty. I see them washing their hands often. I see how they clean their work surfaces. I see how they are dressed. It all looks pretty safe to me, and I’m not the least bit worried when I buy a handful of raw beef, slice it into very small cubes, combine it with some seasonings, and sit down for a gorgeous plateful of tartare de bœuf. I feel safe because my butcher handled the meat properly, and I did too.

But what about parasites? Usually the parasite people mention, although not by name, that they want to avoid is the roundworm Trichinella spiralis. This parasite can cause trichinosis, an illness characterized by digestive disturbance, fever, and muscular rigidity. Before pig husbandry was regulated and all pig food had to be cooked or sterilized in some other manner, this illness was commonly contracted by eating undercooked pork. (The worm dies when exposed to a temperature of 59 °C (137 °F) for a few seconds or frozen at below -30 °C (-22 °F) for 25 hours or -20 °C (-5 °F) for 25 days.) Pork cooked to 60 °C (140 °F) will still appear pink, but will be free of any living parasites. Pork, unlike what my mother-in-law and most of the students in my cooking classes think, does not need to be killed twice. Besides being extremely rare—there are only a handful of cases each year and these tend to derive from undercooked wild game—trichinosis and its symptoms are very treatable with modern drugs.

Referring back to eggs, because eggs pass through the same pipe in the hen that also serves up fecal matter, eggs can be contaminated with the salmonella. It appears that about 1 in 20,000 eggs is contaminated. Another way to look at this number is that if you throw one raw egg into your morning power smoothie for 55 years, you will probably ingest only one contaminated egg during that period. Because I don’t eat that many raw eggs, I don’t worry too much when I throw a raw egg into my occasional tartare de bœuf. (At my age I’ve probably already eaten that first bad egg and I’m now looking for the second one.)

The serving of spoiled or contaminated food is another way we can make enemies out of friends. The solution here is simple, don’t. If you think food may be spoiled or obviously contaminated, discard it. Although I have been known to scrape the mold off the surface of some item in the refrigerator I needed for that night’s dinner, I can’t recommend the practice. Plus, I’ve only done it when the fouled item was subjected to high heat before serving.

Is the fear of making someone sick with your cooking rational? Yes, but if we take simple precautions like washing hands, kitchen work surfaces, and utensils with soap and hot water immediately after they have been in contact with raw meat or poultry and discarding food that is spoiled or contaminated, the likelihood of this fear becoming reality is very, very low.

Related to the fear of making someone sick by undercooking is the fear of raw food, in particular meat and seafood. I find it particularly interesting that people will dine heartily on raw vegetables at the same salad bar that has been assaulted by hundreds of other people, but the thought of eating tartare de bœuf scares them to death. Why is it that we fear bacteria in meat or fish more than bacteria in vegetables? More people get sick from salad bars than sushi bars. The risk of getting sick from properly handled raw food is very low, but I have learned from experience that there is nothing I can say to someone who has a fear of raw food to convince them it is safe.

The fear of overcooking food may be thought of the antithesis of the fear of undercooking, but it is actually much different. The result of overcooking food is that it becomes less edible, or maybe inedible, but no one should get sick because of it, unless it is badly burnt. (Although the thought of eating overcooked vegetables does turn my stomach.) This fear is often cited as the reason for serving vegetables that are almost raw. In the last couple of decades, people have latched onto this strange concept that vegetables need to remain crunchy and almost raw to maintain their flavor and nutrition. This is a backlash to the typical vegetables of the 1950s and earlier when vegetables were overcooked to the point of color loss and flavor distortion. A properly cooked floret of broccoli should be bright green, tender, and a delight to eat, but not crunchy.

I remember in the 1970s when people were buying electric woks and discovering the concept of stir-frying vegetables. The problem then, as now, was that these cooks didn’t understand that woks were designed to work at high heat with a pool of fat providing the heat transfer to the vegetables. A home wok doesn’t reach the high temperatures possible with a commercial wok and home cooks rarely use enough fat. Now that people are discarding their woks and using a frying pan with a flat bottom for the same process, the lack of fat becomes a greater problem unless the veggies are cut quite small. My chef friends in France laugh at Americans eating so-called “cooked” vegetables that the French consider essentially raw. When I talk with students about cooking their vegetables longer, the response I hear is the fear of overcooking. With a little care and a bit of technique, this should not be a problem. One solution may be to stop stir-frying and move to other, more effective techniques of cooking.

Just as people have a fear of overcooking, they also have a fear of over salting. How do they solve the problem? Either they don’t use salt or use such a small amount that it is ineffectual. Salt is often the best way to bring out the maximum flavor in a dish. How to salt properly has previously been dealt with in another article, so I won’t go into the instructions in detail again. In brief, the technique involves tasting the dish as it is salted and to stop adding salt when the maximum flavor is achieved, but not before.

People seem to have become increasingly afraid of various food components in the last few decades, particularly fat and cholesterol. Somewhere along the way people got the idea that dietary cholesterol translated to serum cholesterol and dietary fat became arterial fatty plaques, even though there were no definitive studies in humans to support these ideas. Today, these concepts are considered fact by many people, even though there still is no supporting data and there is an abundance of articles in various media attempting to debunk the notion. But fear marches on!

One of the cooking fears that irks me the most is the fear of not cooking enough food. I like to cook just enough food for each meal—I don’t like leftovers—I don’t like food going bad in the refrigerator. I know people who feel it is necessary to cook twice as much as people can eat so that there will always be leftovers. I don’t mind it if enough food is prepared for more than one meal if it is a dish that benefits from being cooked in advance, like stew. But I don’t like to see a refrigerator full of small containers with little bits of this and a taste of that. These overachieving cooks claim that they don’t want anyone not to get enough to eat, but in the end everyone overeats and there still is food left for the next day. Maybe the problem is not their fear of not having enough food, but my fear of overeating? I’ll work on my fear if they agree to work on theirs.

There are some kitchen fears that are related to the process of cooking. There’s the fear of getting cut and the fear of getting burned. My hands show the scars of many cuts and many burns. These are the realities of being in a kitchen. Up until now, none have caused me any major problems, other than a bit of embarrassment. (Yes, the author of a knife-skills book still occasionally cuts himself!) Professional kitchens keep a well-stocked first aid kit handy, and after you bandage yourself you go back to work. There’s no time off unless a trip to the emergency room is warranted. At home, if I slice myself an hour before my guests arrive, I don’t cancel the dinner. I bandage myself up, drink a little extra wine, and complete the preparations. Maybe because I have been injured so many times in the last fifty years, I have no fear about it, or maybe I’ve just learned that life marches on and wounds heal.

Also related to the process of cooking is the fear of making mistakes, the fear of difficulty, the fear of taking too long, and the fear of work. I see students in class totally unwilling to try something because they are afraid of doing it wrong. A more important problem, as I tell them, is not that they may do something wrong, but that they are unaware of their mistake or are unwilling to admit it. It’s a cliche to say that we learn by our mistakes, but in the kitchen we can if we are aware of them.

This fear may prevent us from attempting a preparation that we perceive as being too difficult. My experience has been that if you stand back and look at a recipe as a group of small steps, each to be taken separately, the recipe becomes easier. Just as I have written this essay one sentence at a time, we cook one step at a time. Each step of a difficult recipe may in actuality be quite simple. Of course, it is not wise to start roasting that frozen turkey thirty minutes before the guests are due to arrive, especially if you forgot to thaw it out two days before. The recipe for roasting turkey is not difficult—the individual steps are simple—but we have to first learn the steps. We shouldn’t avoid roasting a turkey because we are afraid that it will take too long, because it doesn’t. There are only a few steps to be completed that actually require us to be near the turkey, most of the time the turkey is in repose all by itself. So although it may be a number of days from when we move the turkey from the freezer to the refrigerator to thaw until it is finally served, the actual amount of time that is spent preparing the bird is minimal.

I think the reason many of us avoid preparing something like a turkey is not that it is difficult, but that we are afraid of a little work. This is certainly an irrational fear because preparing a turkey is not really much work. Unless the kitchen was too warm, I’ve never broken a sweat cooking turkey. As I have written about on previous occasions, with a little planning and practice, cooking really is not much work—why should anyone have a fear of it?

Related to the fear of work and the fear of difficulty is the fear of cooking from scratch. Anyone born since 1950 has lived in a period of history where the food industry has produced more and more products designed to reduce the amount of time we spend cooking. Why make your own stock when there are those convenient cubes of chemicals that will last at room temperature until the next ice age? Why chop onions when we can buy a bag of chopped onions at our local store? Why grind our own meat and shape it into hamburger patties when we can buy frozen hamburger patties for less money and less work? The two reasons I have is that cooking from scratch allows us to better control the quality of our ingredients and the quality of the preparation. I achieve a great sense of relaxation when I cook, a talent that I’ve been told that makes me unique. What makes cooking relaxing and simple for me, but stressful and difficult for others, may be nothing more than knowledge and experience. I haven’t always relaxed by cooking, but I found that as I became more knowledgeable and practiced, the relaxation just happened. For me, cooking from scratch is my recreational drug of choice.

Maybe one or two of the kitchen fears I’ve mentioned have a ring of truth for you. Maybe you know of other fears that either keep you out of the kitchen or prevent you from doing grand and glorious things while you’re in it. None of these fears should require seeking the help of a professional, unless that professional happens to cook. I would certainly not prescribe large doses of food television, but I would recommend lots of reading and practice. These are fears that we can overcome by ourselves, and maybe even have some fun doing so.