Harold McGee | Smells, Flavors and the Science of Cooking - Ep 153
Episode Notes
My guest today is Harold McGee. He has been writing for more than four decades about the science of food and cooking: where our foods come from, what they are, and how cooking transforms them.
He is best known for his seminal book On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen.
His latest book “Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World's Smells” came out in 2020 and it’s all about smells: the aromas of food and drink, but also the many other flying bits of the world that scent our lives.
Show Notes:
Check out Harold’s Website: https://www.curiouscook.com
Harold on Twitter: @Harold_McGee
Check out Harold’s Books:
Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World's Smells
On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
The Curious Cook: More Kitchen Science and Lore
Keys to Good Cooking: A Guide to Making the Best of Foods and Recipes
Harold McGee's James Beard Award for Who's Who
Culinary Institute of America: https://www.ciachef.edu
Enjoy 35% OFF New West Knife Works
El Bulli Restaurant: http://www.elbulli.info
Alinea Restaurant: https://www.alinearestaurant.com
Chef Kyle Connaughton's Website and Twitter
Chef Heston Blumenthal's Website and Instagram
Hour of Our Delight: Cosmic Evolution, Order, and Complexity Book
Chef Fritz Blank and Deux Cheminees Restaurant in Philadelphia
Learn more about Vanillin Molecule
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[00:00:00]
What's up folks. My guest today needs very little introduction, especially if you've been in the industry for more than five, six years. But for those that might be new, his name is Harold McGee. He's an American author who writes about the chemistry and history of food, science and cooking.
He's best known for his seminal book on food and cooking the science and lore of the kitchen. First published in 1984 and then revised in 2000. He's been the recipient of the James Beard foundation award for who's who in food beverage in America. And his book is in the cookbook hall of fame. And now he's got more hits that have come after that, including the curious cook keys to good cooking and the most recent 2020 publication nose dive, which takes you through why smells and our old factory senses are so.
Important. I've got on screen right now for the video folks who are on YouTube, a picture of a book signing that Harold was so kind to do back when I was a culinary school student. And I've had a signed copy this book right here of, on food and cooking for over 10 years now. And it's, what's so interesting to me about Harold isn't the little.
Factoids or tips because yes, those are extremely helpful. But what I think he and Alton brown and Dave Arnold, and a bunch of other folks have done for us is make it okay to ask why with food. And so if this is the first time you're hearing of Harold's work,
I do ask him at the end of our conversation where he suggests folks start with his books. And of course he shares a ton of amazing insights throughout our conversation. So let's talk to Harold right after I share a little bit about new west LifeWorks and more importantly, they're newly launched. Pro program.
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Just add so much context to why the tool is made, the way that it's. So from their choice of handle materials, to the care that they put into each individual knife's edge, seeing all of the sharpeners and, and, um, knife makers, just go in and individually, put the edge on each individual one and, and finish the handle.
Even coming down to the nature inspired design aesthetics they've quickly become a go-to recommendation for me when it comes to American NA made knives,
If you didn't know new west knife, work's founder, Corey Milligan started out as a line cook. And so he's got that industry experience cooking behind a stove. And so the knives are not just topnotch in terms of the materials and the manufacturing process. They have the little design details that make a difference when you're eight hours into your shift.
What's awesome is new west knife forks is rolling out a pro program for verified culinary professionals who are eligible for believe it or not 35% off their chief fusion and Ironwood knives. You can visit Justin conna.com/new west, or the link in the description of this podcast to register super easy, takes less than five minutes.
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Justin Khanna: I hope you'll forgive me if this is a pretty blunt place to start, but how does it make you feel to see your work touted by literally some of the best chefs in the world?
Because when I go into kitchens and see the chef who has the big bookcase on display, there's always a copy of at least on food and cooking there. So how does that feel?
Harold McGee: Pretty nice especially given where I started which was, you know, it's ancient history now it's back in the 1970s when you know, you, you really didn't go in. Chefs offices or into kitchens as a, as a diner. Just wasn't a thing. And neither was thinking about food in a, in a kind of systematic way, apart from [00:04:00] what people had learned in, you know, traditional sorts of apprenticeships.
So the, the change in the food world has been just astonishing in the last 50 years. I'm appalled to say that it's now been 50 years almost. And and it it's been, yeah, just a a never ending thrill to walk into someone's office and to see that unbeknownst to me maybe I was helping out,
Justin Khanna: Why do you think, and you, you have tons of works that have had so much staying power throughout the years, but on food and cooking, there was a, there was a right place, right time, right. Kind of problem solving that it was doing for the audience. Why do you think if you had to, you know, hindsight look back, why do you think it resonated so much?
Harold McGee: well, I think it was for exactly the reason you just implied, which is that people hadn't thought of the possibility of taking food seriously in that. But people were beginning to take food seriously that way. And I, I feel very lucky to have kind of caught the wave, you know early on when I was, you know, in touch with people back then by snail mail or by telephone calls it was usually not with chefs in restaurants.
It was with students. It was with people who were learning the business, getting into the business and wanted answers that their mentors weren't able to give them. And so it was that, that curiosity that drive to understand because the food world was opening up that made it, that gave me an opening to then kind of present a sort of systematic view of.
Justin Khanna: Would you say that? Because that was me. You perfectly described myself. I was at culinary Institute of America. The only thing that I wanted to do was work in Michelin kitchens because I mean, this was 2010, right around, you [00:06:00] know, like 2009, 2010, lb was best restaurant in the world. Alinea had just started to, they had just come out with their cookbook, the kind of talks at, at Harvard.
I'm sure you remember those because I certainly remember just bingeing the heck out of those and. That was me. That was none of what I was at CIA was kind of tracking with what was being expected from the chef to parties at these kitchens. And simultaneously I think it was right around the time when CIA was just consulting with Kyle Connaughten to come on and do the food science program at CIA.
And finally start to develop that. And the place that we would go was the ideas and food blog, your book, you know, like there, wasn't a ton of structured content on this. And so I guess when you think about how education happens now, I just had a conversation with another person on the podcast, talking about how the traditional hospitality school is.
I mean, he called it dead, like where I'm not going to sugar coat it. He called it completely dead and antiquated. And I'm very much so in the camp that the learning should just continually happen in perpetuity throughout your career. Do you agree with that? Have you seen a model that you're like, no, that's actually a good way to get some foundational knowledge and then gain some experience, I guess.
Can you expand on, on the learning that you've seen happen in the industry?
Harold McGee: Yeah, well, it, it, it has changed a lot and, and I think there have been kind of waves of interest in understanding just the fundamentals, you know, the, what are these materials and, you know, what does heat do to them? Those are very basic things. So back in the nineties, late nineties even the CIA had a course that was designed to delve into that kind of thing, but then they ended up not taking it seriously and it sort of dropped away and that opportunity was lost.
It does seem to me that Eh, [00:08:00] you know culinary school can do a lot of things just as most schools can. But I think one of the most important is actually to cultivate what you just described, that kind of Never ending thirst to understand what's going on because you know, foods and drinks, they're, they're among the most complex materials on the planet.
And you all as cooks are tasked with, you know, manipulating them in ways that that make them interesting that make them make them nourishing and so on. No one should ever have the sense that they really understand food and drink. You know, it really is endless and I especially love you know, Heston, Blumenthal.
I'm a chef. I got to know back in the nineties when he was getting going and we've had wonderful experiences together. He ended up getting a decoration from the queen a few years ago, had an order of the British empire and this allowed him to design his own coat of arms. And so he took the opportunity.
He had to come up with a motto. So of course was a duck on the, on the coat of Barnes. But the motto he chose was question everything. And that's the, the, the motto that I think maybe all human beings, but especially cooks should adopt, which is to, to, to really engage with the things in the world that are important to you.
And there's always something more to understand, to appreciate them to, and to pass on to others.
Justin Khanna: So many threads there. One I wanted to quickly just touch on is you're you're right. Like us as chefs have this we're tasks. Often we live in the how of what we [00:10:00] do and whether it's time or resources or interests, even some people just don't want to know about the why. And I'll admit I I've used on food and cooking and your, your other books is, you know, just-in-time information versus like just-in-case information.
Cause you can just get completely bogged down and there's, there's so much why there's so much it's chemistry. It's science. It's it's it's there's a lot going on versus just thinking, oh, you need to cook this to medium rare. And so you have this other quote, which is while young chefs should learn about the science of cooking, they also learn how to, they need to learn how to cook.
And I certainly agree with that, but do you find that there's I got bogged down in too much book knowledge before doing any hands-on stuff. So do you, do you agree there that that it's better to start doing, and then when you run into a block and you're like, I don't really actually understand how this works, then you do a little bit of research for the young culinarian.
Who's potentially listening to this. Who's feeling a little bit overwhelmed. Do you have any insight to share with them?
Harold McGee: well I would suggest not thinking that either. Of those things has priority over the other. I mean and, and I, I'm a firm believer in the, the idea that cooks chefs they know a lot, whether they know science or not, because what they know has come from their experience. And even if they don't know the chemistry, they know that certain things work and other things don't, and this kind of.
Process has this kind of effect and different process, a different effect, that kind of thing. My favorite favorite example of this is you know when I started writing about food chemistry back in the seventies I read in Julia child that you should use a copper bowl to whip, egg whites, to make meringues
and souffle's, you know egg foams of any kind. And I looked in the scientific literature of the day and I didn't [00:12:00] see any backing for that. And so I thought, well, this is probably an old cooks tale, maybe promulgated by the copper industry. Nothing, nothing to it. Until I was looking for illustrations for my book free ones.
And so I was looking at really old book cookbooks and I found in an 18th century French book, an illustration of a boy. In a kitchen professional kitchen, quipping, egg whites in what's clearly a hemispherical copper bowl. And the key even says it's a comparable. So I thought, well, you know, if, if they've been doing it for a couple of hundred years, maybe it's worth taking a look.
And so I got a copper bowl, which was expensive and I didn't have a lot of money at the time. But I made the investment and sure enough, it's, it's evident within 30 seconds that there's a huge difference. So, and cooks have known that forever chemists still don't quite understand what's going on. I mean, I did some work with a chemist friend to try to to elucidate it, but chefs cooks have a lot of information stored up in their experience.
And so adding to that experience all the time is going to add to your, your knowledge and your understanding. And then the science is there to help you
make sense.
of it
Justin Khanna: But you touched on. there is a lot of bad information. There's the endless slew of call it like old wives tales or, you know, the game of telephone just happens. It's not even somebody trying to be malicious. It's just information gets past human to human and things get lost in translation. Or, you know, you forget the crucial step of blank, you know, to, to make sure that this actually works.
Or this is the actual mechanism that's making this happen. So yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's hard to parse. It's good to, I mean, you use the, the phrase in your book title, curious, like curiosity might actually be the driver that people should keep in mind.
Harold McGee: Yeah. Yeah. And it seems to me that, one way [00:14:00] to enjoy both at the same time is to realize that it's okay to be curious without a particular goal in mind, or without a particular problem that you have to solve. So when you have a little bit of a bandwidth to just to think about other things and to Marvel at some of the transformations that take place, I mean, we take a lot of this stuff for granted because especially you all, you see it every day, but if you stop and think that, you know, you start with these, these liquid egg whites, and all of a sudden they turn into this snowy foam.
That's, that's amazing. So what's going on there?
Justin Khanna: I want to take a bit of a transition to talk about nosedive as, as a book. And I've wanted to ask you this for a while. Do you find similarities between smell and poetry?
Harold McGee: That's that's an interesting question. I guess what I would say off the top of my head is that smells evoke, poetic thoughts, you know, they're, they're they're evocative, you know, they, they remind you of other things. They, they lead you to make connections that you wouldn't have made in that moment in which you're, you're smelling that smell.
So I would say it's, it's a stimulus to imagination. Maybe that's the way to put it. And so, you know, it's interesting, you asked the question, I started out life wanting to teach poetry.
Justin Khanna: That's why I asked just as a fun nod to your background and, and I, I get the same thing. The, the, the way you hear a som describe what they're getting out of a glass of wine, or you hear really good food writer. Talk about a meal, there's something with language and how they describe it. It's not just tastes.
It's like they're, they're describing other things.
Harold McGee: Yeah, that's that's the, the interesting thing about smell was that, you know, they're, they're invisible, they're ineffable. [00:16:00] And so you have to come up with some way of communicating the ineffable to another human being and you have to use the words, of course. And then those words have to refer to things that are affable so that you can and, and it, it's often a matter of searching through a, you know, a field of words that kind of gets you close.
But, but they never get you there all the way.
Justin Khanna: Well, because we're just inherently flawed in that we're limited by our language. There's only so many words that we have at our disposal to describe what we're experiencing or the sensation that's happening in our olfactory system. I mean, have you had any tools? I mean, your background in poetry, I can imagine has helped just not just writing, but as you encounter food and you're starting to hear people describe things.
I'm a big proponent of having chefs improve their ability to talk about food. Because even if you don't think that you're going to be this person who does like, quote unquote wax poetic about your dish, being able to describe it to your line cook or your front of. Person team member to describe it to the guests sitting on table 12 is infinitely valuable because now anytime you want to run something, you have this ability to sell the idea by your ability to talk about food.
And so, you know, to the listener, who's like, yeah, I think that's, it would be cool if I could do that, but I have no capacity to talk about food. Had there been anything that you've seen that's that's helpful or that someone can keep in mind?
Harold McGee: No, I, I would just I would just second what you're saying my experience as a diner has often been exactly what you describe. The server will be able to give me a list of ingredients, but you know, that's that only gets you so far and yeah.
Justin Khanna: you went through that era where that was, what menus were written as, you know, salsa, fi beet root sorrel. And that's like with hyphens in between. And that was the, that was the menu.[00:18:00]
Harold McGee: yeah, yeah, yeah. And it seems to me that it would help if chefs and servers alike would You know, go through the exercise of trying to describe something trying to describe that dish, even to someone who doesn't have it sitting in front of them, you know? But yeah, it, it, it is a challenge and it's always difficult to do, you know, again, as a diner, I'm, I'm very often surprised by what appears to me on my plate, even though I've ordered that thing.
Justin Khanna: Perfect transition. Because you know, you don't have to talk about fancy adjectives to us. I would love for you to act. Breakdown flavor for us. How should we think about flavor?
Harold McGee: well the way I like, like to think about it is that it's got many dimensions. And I, I like to think of taste, you know, what we experience on our tongues, which is a relatively limited set of sensations, maybe between a half a dozen and a dozen, depending on who you believe. I th I think of sweet sour, salty, bitter, umami chemist thesis, the pungency of peppers and things like that.
I think of those things as kind of the foundation of building the building, being the overall flavor, and then the aromas being the superstructure, you know, what's built on top of those those foundations. And if you have aromas all by themselves, you know, that's like smelling a perfume, you know, they're, they're not anchored in your mouth, on your tongue with the sensation of of actually eating and similar similarly of course, tastes without smells are there there's, it's pinching your nose and not being able to tell the difference between an apple and a and a potato.
So that's the way I like to think about it. It's it's. A beautiful structure. It's got many [00:20:00] corners and levels and so on. It's transient. So, you know, the building goes up and comes down again within a matter of seconds. But there is that kind of overall structure to it.
Justin Khanna: Do you have any tips for folks who are potentially working with food on the daily, and they've never actually taken the time to think about flavor or, or, or tasting from the sense of what you're talking about. Taking sweet sour, salty, bitter, umami, and layering it with aroma. I think most of us who have done any sort of wine tasting, no.
Introducing more oxygen into your, you know, as you sip, you take a little bit more air in and that helps you identify a couple of different aromas that you might not have perceived. If you just kinda like took a quick sip and just let that coat your pallet and then, and then swallow. Do you have any tips for people to taste better?
If there, if there are any that come to mind.
Harold McGee: Well yeah, just tasting a lot
Justin Khanna: Got it. Got
Harold McGee: and tasting with attention, you know, with a focus on that act. And then I think it really does help to understand a little bit about what's going on as you taste, because it helps you make sense of the sensations, which are, which they, which can be confusing because they're transitory, you know, you, you think you're smelling something or tasting something, but then a second later, as you're focusing on it, it's gone, you know, and you have to.
Justin Khanna: And you can't bring it back.
Harold McGee: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So understanding, first of all, on the, on the end of the food or the beverage what's going on, you know, that there are these volatile molecules that are actually escaping from the material and getting into the air. And that's how we experience aromas. Whereas the tastes have to be experienced by actually putting something on our [00:22:00] tongues and chewing and releasing those molecules so that they can interact with the tongue.
So that's, that's, what's going on on the level of the food, but then our brains are making sense of this really complex experience on the basis of what it already knows. It's trying to make sense of what's going on. And so it will. Pay close attention to the immediate first sensation and then as it and this is all happening of course, unconsciously.
So we have no control over it, but, but it experience, it influences what we experience consciously. The brain will actually edit and send to our consciousness. Those aspects of the experience that it thinks are important based on past experience. And so if there's a really strong aroma, for example once it registers the fact that that, that aroma is there and that it's constant, it'll gradually tune it out so that you can focus on other things.
And that's why sometimes. Aromas can be there one second and then kind of disappear the next. It's not because those molecules aren't there. It's because your brain is deciding for you. You don't need to pay attention to that so much. And that's why learning to pay attention is so important because you can actually override that editing that's going on unconsciously, if you're asking your brain.
Okay. But I really want to know, is that thing still there? And then you search for it. You'll find it.
Justin Khanna: call it a, an analogy that, of that I've heard you use before with smells and it, it really resonated pardon the pun. But you, you you've shared that smells are more like cord. Then they are notes. Can you break that down for the listener and how you might actually be experiencing different molecules and seemingly unrelated [00:24:00] things, but they're registering in your brain as, as their own kind of smell.
Harold McGee: Yeah, so smells are essentially well, the, the cool thing about smelling taste is that of all our senses they're the ones that actually give us direct readout of the materials around us. You know, the actual material, world sight and hearing are very indirect by comparison. And so when we smell something, we're actually smelling little bits of that thing, which are, which have the property of being small enough molecules and light enough molecules that they can fly through the air.
And into our noses and be registered by our, by our brain. And the world of course is a really complicated place. There are. If we could actually visualize the molecules around us, there, there would be, you know, uncountable, that would be, it would be like living in a cloud. And so we're, we're always smelling many different things at the same time.
We're never smelling justice. Molecule at the same time or at a given time. So that's the, the, the first part of it. And then and, and that, that's why I use the analogy of a cord. You know, when you smell a glass of wine, what you're getting are a bunch of different molecules from that wine, which overall integrated together, give you the impression of that wines, aroma.
And so it's more like a chord than like a single note. There, there is no single note that captures the nature of the wine. And then I'm sorry, I'm forgetting the other aspect of your question
Justin Khanna: Well, it was just about notes because I think you'll the most striking one for me was hearing about something like vanilla. As something that you can smell in, not just the actual, you know, soaked in alcohol pod [00:26:00] of, of vanilla bean, but then you'll hear about people describing, you know, like buttery bread in a Oaked Chardonnay.
And you're like, oh, there's vanilla and happening there as well. And so what you're perceiving is like there in the notes and chords thing makes so much sense because I think I heard you mentioned in another podcast interview where, and I have it here in my glass. So I'll use this as a a visual, you can't smell lemon.
Like it's not a note, like you're smelling multiple things and all of those notes might be present in other. Foods beverages, just plant life that you experience out in the world. And the difference between the two, it helped me a lot when I was in, you know, a wine class in culinary school to hear about the fact that, oh, a smell of one individual thing is made up of multiple things in your experience in them altogether.
And then what you've done such a good job of breaking down is your brain then turns it into this emotional, psychological, I remember blank that helped me a lot because it made it so that I wasn't putting so much pressure on myself to do the, the Somalia thing of just like, oh, can you identify dried red cherries in this wine?
Cause it's yeah.
Harold McGee: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe another way to think about it is that you know we have different in music, different scales and different notes in those scales and they can be used to make many different melodies and orchestrations and so on. And the same thing is true of the material world, there are molecules in vanilla vanilla in particular that give us that, that kind of characteristic note of vanilla, but you can find that very same molecule in other things in the world and in wood, for example, or if you, if you're burning leaves or, I mean just many, many different things.
And that's true [00:28:00] of not just vanilla as a molecule, but pretty much all the molecules that we find in food of which there are thousands. So that's what makes it possible for us to find echoes of one thing in something that seems to be completely unrelated. But in fact, they do share those notes.
Justin Khanna: Have you ever heard of a pastry chef named Elwin Boyles? He was the pastry chef of the French laundry once upon a time.
Harold McGee: No,
Justin Khanna: So I distinctly remember I had the pleasure of working with him. I'm almost positive. He's working in Tokyo these days, but what was so funny about his presence in the kitchen? And this is touching on a point you made about kind of building that flavor tastes repertoire is he would just walk around and go up to your station and you were thinly slicing cucumber, mandolin, ING, radish, or mixing a cheese sauce. You would just pick up something off of your cutting board and he would eat it. He would sit there, he would chew it. He would look at you and you just kind of give this. Hmm. And then walk away and go do something else. And he was working on pastry and he was, you know, like they have a, you know, not limited set of ingredients, but compared to the, you know, eight or 12 courses that come before it.
But I, it really stuck with me of, I need to be tasting more stuff. Like I just need to be like, be more like Elwin, like just walk around and taste stuff. But he was doing it. He is like a pause thing. It wasn't sustenance. There was more to it than what he was doing there. And as you brought up, you know, like maybe you just need to taste more.
Like you just mean more volume when you're talking about like, how to increase that in yourself. And so I just thought I'd share that story for the, for the listener. Cause you, you that very distinctly. I was like, oh, I associate that story with a person. Like there's someone in my, in my life who I can remember did that.
And it re it really is.
Harold McGee: Yeah. And in fact that that pausing in that Hm is a great thing to [00:30:00] remember at something that I had to sort of relearn for the purposes of this book about smells because you know, we don't have a good word for paying attention to a smell, you know, w when it comes to again, vision and hearing, we, we do, we, we can stare at something.
And in the case of hearing, it's the difference between hearing a sound and actually listening to. To it. And so the, the Japanese have an incense ceremony where it's a bit like the tea ceremony, where you appreciate all the different aspects of the experience of incense. But especially of course, the smell of the incense and the, the language, the word that they use for that paying attention is translated into English as listening.
And so I love the idea of using that term, listening to smells because at first it doesn't make any sense in English. But it helps you realize that that's something we don't normally do. And so stopping and listening, not just the smells, but as with the pastry chef to the flavor of something and, and closing your eyes and really focusing on it and registering it to remember, that's it's a lot of fun and it's also, I think, a key to to really broadening your, your palette when it comes to enjoying things, but also creating things.
Justin Khanna: The story goes and the great unfortunate irony is that you lost your sense of smell when you were writing nosedive. Would you say that you've fully recovered from that? That must've been so, Ugh. I can't even think about that.
Harold McGee: Well, actually it has now happened several times.
Justin Khanna: Ah,
Harold McGee: It was, it was much more scary when I was writing a book about smell. But I, I did have COVID recently and I [00:32:00] lost my sense of smell after, after the book had come out. And yeah, it's, it's both scary and also just takes the pleasure out of so much of everyday life.
You know, you, you go out into a, go for a walk in your neighborhood and there are things that you, you know, by smell the, the neighbor's cooking, but also the flowers in their garden, whether they've composted the flowers recently, that kind of thing. But then you know, the, the incentive to cook, I found just kind of dissipated because you know, it doesn't, it doesn't matter what it tastes like.
So yeah, it's, it is devastating. And I, I feel very lucky it came back.
Justin Khanna: Yeah, wait, I mean, wishing that, that comes back in as, what is the word? Vibrant as it was previously? Cause I, again, I'm like knocking on wood that, yeah, it's, it's terrifying. I mean, you hear stories of grant, Achatz lost his sense of taste and smell. I think it was taste, maybe it was smell at the same time, but yeah, for, for those of us who do work with food, it's such a, you know, it's how we experience our work.
Harold McGee: Yeah. And for everyone else in the world, it's how they nourish themselves and, and get pleasure from life, you know, and it has highlighted how little we actually understand about the, the biology of taste and smell. And so that's, you know, if you want to look for a bright side, that would be it. It has highlighted for the biomedical community, both how little we in, we know about it and how critical it really is to quality of life.
And so people are now paying more attention to it than they had in the past.
Justin Khanna: you have this story of this completely mind blowing moment while you're eating. I think it's grouse at an English restaurant and you couldn't speak for 30 seconds. I wanted to ask how did writing [00:34:00] all of your books and putting on all the work that you shared with, with the industry and with the world?
How did that change? How you experience restaurants now that you've like really dove into working with food so closely.
Harold McGee: Yeah, no, I I pay way more attention to not only to the food itself, but to the, to the workings of the place. I mean, I've spent enough time now just observing in kitchens and occasionally helping to chop a couple of things. Just to appreciate what an amazing logistical exercise it is to feed people in that way.
I had no idea until I, you know, went behind the scenes and spent a few evenings there. So I appreciate that. And and then, yeah, I especially when I'm trying something for the first time that what you're referring to is my experience of of grouse, which I had read about for decades, but had never actually tasted and kind of assumed that it would be like duck or, you know pheasant or quail or something like that.
And it of course turned out to be you know, like that, to the. Fifth power. And when something like that happens when I'm surprised, especially these days, I really do a pause just to, register that fact and to try to make sense of it. And, yeah, so that was, that was an important moment for me.
Justin Khanna: It's your first day after a weekend of your weekend, it's a Saturday morning. Let's call it and you kind of lumber into your kitchen and you're going to make eggs for yourself. How do you make those eggs?
Harold McGee: oh, I'll probably scramble them with, with butter. Yeah.
Justin Khanna: And do you do like you try to go super low and slow and soft, like for romantic kind of, you know, art, American style, like a little harder.
Harold McGee: Not super soft or hard either one, because I, I grew up with the Kurds and I, and I like those. I like that contrast in texture.
Justin Khanna: Is there, [00:36:00] I mean, I know you that your background isn't in literature and poetry and astronomy, like so many different disciplines that you've kind of studied in. Is there a book that's been particularly impactful for you because you've written so many as it does anything come to mind as a book that that's helped you?
Harold McGee: I guess I would, blanking out on the name of the book itself. The author is Hubert Reeves and the book is on the shelves behind me. I won't, I won't desert you to find it on the shelf, but he, he is an astrophysicist, but he's also French. And so he has a way of putting things that I find just really inspiring.
And, and he wrote a book about basically the early history of the universe and where. Earth and life fit into that picture. And that's really where a lot of the first part of my book nose dive comes from is, is in fact, I quote him in one of the epigraphs because it's a perspective that I think it's just a really unusual perspective.
It's it's all about, you know, the origin of the elements and electrons and positrons and this kind of stuff. It can seem very hard science, but he finds the, the poetry in it and the and the connection to our everyday lives in it. So, yeah, he's, he's a wonderful model.
Justin Khanna: well, find that book and we will put it in the show notes. So don't even stress about the name we'll research and find it and make sure that people can can't get access to it. Cause I, I love that stuff too. I love Astrophysics documentaries and just deep dives into black holes and neutron stars and all of that stuff.
Cause it's, it's a very humbling thing as well, to just think about the cosmos and how small we are. And it just, there's a lot of benefits that come from thinking big. And so I'm right there with you.
Harold McGee: Yeah, it seems to me that it [00:38:00] also, as you're saying, you know, it's, it's a huge perspective and then reminds us how small we are and what a brief life span we have. But then I think that also once you take that in, it helps expand the moment that you're actually enjoying, you know, to, to think wow. Where I can actually understand something.
The universe at large. And I'm sitting here at my desk with a glass of wine or a cup of coffee and enjoying this microcosm that, that macrocosm made possible. So, yeah.
Justin Khanna: Obviously when your, your, your sense of smell comes back and you're able to kind of get back into the kitchen. I don't know how mature your cooking these days, but is there a technique that you're still either intimidated by, or you're just like when I have the time I'm really going to dig into pasta, making creme anglaise, dehydration, you know, roasting whole ducks, like anything come to mind as like, I've always really wanted to learn how to do blank in the kitchen.
Harold McGee: Well, first of all, I should say that I had COVID at this point now almost two months ago and my smell slowly came back. So I, I think it's, it's pretty much there. Now of course the, the flip side of that is that our sense of smell does decline with the years. And so it ain't what it used to be, but it's still, you know, It hasn't taken the pleasure out of food. I've I'm still enjoying that and, and noticing things on walks that that are, are invisible, but, but I know they're there. Anyway I'm, I'm still wrestling after decades with bread. And I know this, you know, people have been doing a lot with bread over the last couple of years.
I spent a lot of time basically baking every [00:40:00] day back in the nineties and thought I'd pretty much nailed it. And then, you know, went on to other things. And then I joined everyone else. And they're just still things about it. The thing that intrigues me about bread, because you can make almost any dough, you know, tastes okay and you can find a use for it.
But what I especially love is the way when you've gotten everything just right. And you slice halfway through the loaf, you can kind of see the history of the rise, you know, you can see
yeah.
The, the bubbles. Pointing upward. There, there, the heat has come from the bottom. The expansion is happening from there and it's rising to the sky.
And then it's frozen by the, the solidification of the, of the crust. And I used to be able to kind of do that and get these wonderful patterns. And I it's just way more hit or miss for me nowadays than it used to be. So I'm still trying to figure out what it was I knew back then that I've forgotten or what, I just kind of lucked out as part of my procedure back then that that isn't part of my procedure these days.
Justin Khanna: So to confirm it's, it's, it's sourdough that you're interested or this kind of, you know, yeast risen probably you know, has, has a proper crumb and you bake it at a high temperature to get the brown crust and outside because bread, I mean, talk about microcosms. Like there's a big, like revolution in Parker house rolls.
And then if you dig in Tibet gets, and then invariably you get into like making bagels, which is a completely different process. So to be clear, your, your sourdough fascinated. Am I
Harold McGee: Well actually all of the above, you know, because they each I'm looking for the same kind of thing and all not bagels because of course there they've very different life history, but yeah, just the, the kind of liveliness that bread can express [00:42:00] that's, that's what I'm looking for.
Justin Khanna: You somehow get a call after we turned the mics off that the person on the other line says, Harold, you've just won an all expenses, paid trip to eat at your dream restaurant. And when you get there, there's someone you've always wanted to have dinner with waiting to eat with you. What is that restaurant and who is that person?
Harold McGee: So many, you know, before it was no thoughts coming through one. I now so many thoughts going through my mind that, you know, picking one.
Justin Khanna: You can name a couple, you can name a couple.
Harold McGee: Let's see you know, there are just so many places I wouldn't go to a restaurant that I've been to before, because I've been to plenty that have been really wonderful and I would be very happy to be back again. But what I love is actually going to places I haven't been and having an experience that I haven't had before and part of the problem there is that I don't know what those restaurants are that are going to have that kind of magical experience, but I do love So, you know, there, there are historical characters who you would love to have dinner with the people who are alive today.
Yeah. Again, if I could pick a couple of people to dine with, it would, one would be a chef named Fritz blank who passed away a few years ago. But was a member of that original molecular gastronomy crew. Had a restaurant in Philadelphia called dish feminae. And so he was old school, but open to.
The new school and just a wonderful rock hunter and, and, and someone who could help me appreciate what it was that I was experiencing. And then Heston who I've known for a long time. And who's gone through a lot since we first met. And it would be funny again, to, to share a forward-looking meal with him.
Justin Khanna: I mean, those are the best friends to have because they would probably take care of the restaurant recommendation for you and take you to a new place that [00:44:00] you've never been to. That would probably just be a great, a great time. Last question. And I asked this to all my guests. And I know that you have expressed that you're on the food science side.
You're a writer, you cook at home yourself, but to the audience listening. And because you've gotten so many questions from ambitious young, I call them hungry industry pros. What do you think chefs can be doing better to help the next generation?
Harold McGee: Well, I guess the thing that has been missing a lot in the past that I think is is better nowadays, but could always be even better is simply encouraging curiosity, encouraging questioning you know, getting back to question every everything. We and in fact, that's reminding me.
of Yet another wonderful chef from my past, I think no longer with us French. Who said in French Je sais je sais que je se jamais I know, I know that I'll never know. So just encouraging the younger generation to not to try to know everything, to realize that it's impossible to know everything.
You never know everything. And that's okay. In fact, that's, that's part of what drives you to, to go in every day and work with the same ingredients, because you never know what you're going to discover.
Justin Khanna: Harold has been so great to speak with you. We will leave links to all of your books and, and any place to, you know, get in touch with you, or is there a place that you recommend people start if this is the first time that someone who is just coming up and is super young and just gotten into the industry, and they're hearing about Harold McGee for the first time, now that you have such a library, do you recommend people start at a specific place?
I can imagine it's just follow your curiosity, but do you, do you have a
Harold McGee: a recommendation for.
Justin Khanna: four of your books where to potentially start or buy first or, you know, just kind of deep dive.
Harold McGee: Yeah. [00:46:00] You know I, I would if you can find a used copy because it's no longer in print I do have a book called the curious cook and, you know, on food and cooking might be a little daunting. In fact, I hear that a lot from working chefs that it's useful to them. They thank me for it, and the curious cook is actually a series of stories.
It's you know, getting curious about a particular aspect of cooking and then following my nose you know, trying to answer for my own understanding what's going on without recourse to the technical literature, just by doing experiments. So maybe that would be the place, the book called the curious cook, which I think you can find for, you know, five bucks.
Justin Khanna: Thank you, not just for being on the show, but for making it socially acceptable in industry-wide acceptable for us drafts to ask why I don't just, I know I don't just speak for myself when I, when I say that you truly made it. Okay. I think for us to say there, isn't an answer to this and I'm not okay with that.
I think that there, there is some more exploring we can do and, and research that you can dig into and, and it's, it's helped people like me. So, so, you know, just to say, thank you for that and just thank you for your, for your time today.
Harold McGee: well, my pleasure, Justin. Thank you.
Justin Khanna:
I mean getting to talk to Harold McGee, are you kidding me? If you would've told culinary school, Justin, that this was what my day just was.
You would've had to have pinched me because he's such a positive source of knowledge in the industry and his willingness to just
chat
for you folks is just a joy. And I know some of you folks might be intimidated coming off of a conversation like that, or even just looking at like the tones that are his books, but listen, these.
Memorization books. That's what I wanna wanna just jump in here at the end and remind you folks of is it's not gonna make you better to individually have chemistry [00:48:00] mechanisms memorized and in your back pocket, right. When you're trying to get up for when you're trying to get set up for service. But if you've literally gotten your delegation of your first fermentation project, or you are starting to work with dairy for ice cream base.
Crack this open and give it a read and just start to understand some of the creative and science based principles at play during your projects. Cause that's what I did. And that's what certainly helped me. And this really helped me wrap my head around why things are happening. And so you, then you can take those principles that you learn, like coagulating protein or gelatinization in starches or any of the concepts that he discusses in the book and see how they're used in.
Projects across your career. Again, don't come in thinking that you're gonna be some hot shot, pushing up your glasses and being like, I know why this works.
it is important, but it's not the whole picture. And so that's why I like to, you know, give that little context, especially if you. A line cook chef to Partee.
You're, uh, working with food on the day today, where a little bit of why might actually add another facet to you as a professional. I think that's much more interesting than coming in and trying to be a know-it-all when it comes to food last friendly reminder, if you wanna snag 35% off your next purchase from new west knife forks, you should sign up for their pro program, which is available in the link in the description of this podcast, or always available on Justin conna.com/new west that's N E w w E S.
I really appreciate your attention as always
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