To be a faster, more creative cook, take a cue from restaurant chefs, J. Kenji López-Alt suggests, and rely on culinary building blocks.
This pepper-and-onion base can be used to enhance a number of dishes.
When cooking for my family at home, I rarely use recipes. Instead, I’ll pull from a collection of what I refer to as culinary building blocks. And I’m not talking about a mental library of recipes and techniques (though those can help). I’m talking about actual, physical things.
Open my fridge, and you’ll find a shocking number of plastic deli containers and Mason jars. Homemade and store-bought sauces, dressings, condiments, pickles, chile oils, sauce bases, concentrated stocks, curry pastes — anything that can add a quick, easy boost of flavor to my meals — take up a good 40 percent of my shelf space.
Most restaurant walk-in refrigerators are similar. Fresh produce and raw meat might make up half the real estate, while the other half might be devoted to these building blocks. They’re an essential step in operational efficiency. There’s a reason restaurants are able to serve dishes that taste like they took all day to prepare between the time you placed your order and the time you finished your appetizer. Most likely, those meals were made from building blocks that did take all day, with only the final bits — searing the salmon filet or grilling the chicken breast — done à la minute.
Source: Ryan Liebe for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.These building blocks vary by cuisine, and by chef, but they all invariably have an extra-long shelf life (typically weeks, if not months) and concentrated flavor. In fine dining or seasonal restaurants, where menus shift daily based on market ingredients, they’re critical, not just to ensure that seasonal dishes come out tasting good with very little time to iterate or test, but to maintain the flavor identity; that is, the ingredients, preparations and aromas that lend cohesion to a restaurant experience or are unique to a particular chef.
The San Francisco chef Pim Techamuanvivit uses her grandmother’s nam prik pao as a base for tom yum.
The San Francisco chef Pim Techamuanvivit makes her
grandmother’s nam prik pao (a sweet-sour-spicy chile jam
flavored with tamarind and shallots) and uses it as the
base for tom yum and in a sauce for miang (betel-leaf
wraps) at her restaurant Nari. It makes its way into the
dressing of her yum yai salad, and is used to flavor a
seasonal noodle salad at her restaurant Kin Khao. Alex
Guarnaschelli of Butter in Midtown Manhattan preserves
seasonal Champagne grapes with mustard and wine to serve
on cheese plates, as a condiment for duck, in a salad with
fennel and goat cheese, and as a garnish for pork ravioli.
Spice blends and other dry pantry preparations are also handy building blocks that don’t require refrigeration. In “The Juhu Beach Club Cookbook,” the chef Preeti Mistry includes a recipe for chaat masala that flavors her pav bhaji and some of the Indian-inflected pizzas she served at Navi Kitchen in Oakland, Calif. She spikes the base with extra red chile powder before tossing it with fries or sprinkling it over brussels sprouts and asparagus as they sauté.
Source: David Rama Terrazas Morales for The New York Times.Wildfire smoke may harm whales and dolphins: Here’s what we know
As North America's West Coast burns, scientists are concerned marine mammals will be harmed by smoke inhalation, an unstudied phenomenon.
Smoke envelops Mondos Beach near Ventura, California, in 2017. Dolphins and porpoises that swim just offshore are particularly vulnerable to breathing in smoke.
Source: PHOTOGRAPH
BY MARK RALSTON/AFP, GETTY IMAGES.
Little research has been done on how marine mammals are affected by prolonged exposure to the smoke and chemicals released during wildfires, but if the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico is any indicator, they could face serious health effects in the years to come.
Ten years ago, as a first responder in New Orleans, veterinarian Cara Field saw for herself how the worst oil spill in U.S. history affected the region’s wildlife. The spill released 200 million gallons of oil into the ocean, much of which rose to the surface. As part of the cleanup, crews burned it off into the atmosphere. But research just five years later showed bottlenose dolphins that breathed the chemical-laden smoke developed severe lung diseases, were more prone to infections, and their offspring died at higher rates.
Field, now the medical director at the Marine Mammal Center, a conservation nonprofit in Sausalito, California, fears that marine mammals along the western coast of North America could be facing a similar fate, during a season of disastrous wildfires that have destroyed more than seven million acres.
Wildfire smoke is made up of a range of gases, including carbon monoxide; nitrogen dioxide; polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs; and hazardous particulate matter, which has been shown to increase risks of respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses in humans.
Because whales, dolphins, porpoises, and other marine mammals are adapted to life at sea, where there are fewer air pollutants than on land, they “would be expected to be more susceptible to injury from inhaled particulates,” Field says. That could have grave consequences for species such as sea otters and orcas, or killer whales, which are already in decline in the region. (Read how the Exxon Valdez spill devastated orcas.)
Because the effects of wildfire smoke on marine mammals aren’t well understood and the potential threat is high, Field is urging scientists along the West Coast to begin collecting data now on marine mammal health in areas affected by wildfires. Though there have not been reports of stranded marine mammals suffering from smoke inhalation this fire season, it’s still possible, Field says.
“Now is the time to get our baseline, pick what samples to look for, and start identifying species or populations that would be potential candidates to study,” she says.
Source: Wildfires 101 | National GeographicIt’s impossible to tell what most hurt the dolphins in the Gulf: breathing in the smoke when the spilled oil was burned off, ingesting oil through the food chain, or a combination of both, Field says.
Regardless, dolphins and porpoises are more likely to experience irritation of their airways and absorb more hydrocarbons than whales, as they tend to stay closer to shore and breathe more frequently than deep-diving mammals.
Meteorite Is a Love Letter to Space Rocks
For centuries, scientists thought meteorites were too fantastical to exist. A new book reveals that they hold even more mysteries.
ONE NIGHT IN April, 2019, the skies above La Palmera, a village in northern Costa Rica, started to glow as a motorcycle-sized meteorite broke apart and scattered chunks of hot space rock over the rain forest below. It was just one of thousands of meteorites that hit the Earth every year, but this particular one, later dubbed Aguas Zarcas, caused a frenzy among experts. To the untrained eye, its fragments look like unassuming gray rock. But packed inside are a menagerie of organic molecules and space dust that predate the birth of our solar system.
Source: COURTESY OF
TIMOTHY GREGORY.
Aguas Zarcas is among the most pristine examples ever discovered of a class of meteorites known as carbonaceous chondrites. It’s a deeply unsexy name, but these ancient space rocks are like time machines that provide windows into the universe as it existed billions of years ago. They’re unique geological records that detail the formation of amino acids in space, which some scientists believe may have been the abiotic grist that kick-started the evolution of life on Earth. They’re a rarity among rarities, prized by collectors and scientists, and are often worth more than their equivalent weight in gold.
Carbonaceous chondrites play a starring role in Meteorite, a new book by the University of Bristol cosmochemist Tim Gregory. But these bizarre extraterrestrial visitors are just one of a seemingly endless variety of weird and wonderful space rocks, and Gregory’s passion for his subject drips from every page. Meteorite is a mix of science and history that’s filled with anecdotes of close calls and happy accidents. Gregory strikes a good balance between hard science and the hard-to-believe, but he promises everything between the covers is true.
WIRED caught up with Gregory at home in Nottingham, England, to learn more about the book and why the best place to find a meteorite is at the end of the Earth. The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
WIRED: You work as a ‘cosmochemist.’ What is cosmochemistry, and how did you get into it?Gregory: I've always loved rocks, and I've always loved space, as well. I discovered a couple of years into my undergraduate degree that there's a discipline that combines both of them—rocks and space—and that's cosmochemistry. It uses the same tools as geochemistry, but it just happens to be on rocks from outer space instead of the Earth.
What makes space rocks different from Earth rocks?There are a few things that distinguish meteorites from Earth rocks. The most obvious one is their age. Almost all meteorites we’ve discovered come from asteroids, and they cooled down very quickly after they formed. The Earth has an internal heat engine through the decay of radioactive isotopes that is still powering volcanic and tectonic processes. So the Earth is still geologically active, whereas the geological processes on these asteroids was very short-lived. So the rocks that come from these places, the meteorites, haven't changed much at all in the last four and a half billion years. They’re far older than the oldest Earth rocks.
How can you tell a meteorite from any other rock on Earth unless you see it fall to the ground?Meteorites look exactly like Earth rocks, so we have to go into the chemistry and look at their isotope composition. There are very subtle chemical differences that sort of prove their extraterrestrial origin. They come from fundamentally different worlds, which inherited a slightly different blend of chemicals when they formed. With the meteorites, there's no way that you can find that sort of chemical fingerprint on Earth unless it came from another world.
Where do scientists find their meteorites?We've got about 60,000 meteorites in the worldwide collection, and most of them came from Antarctica. There are a few reasons for that. The first one is really obvious: Generally, meteorites are really dark when they land on the surface, and ice is white. So they stand out like a sore thumb on the ice sheet.But there's another really curious property in Antarctica that I go into some detail about in the book. Antarctica has this flowing ice sheet that acts like a natural conveyor belt. Meteorites pitter-patter down on it at the same rate they do all over the planet, but unlike the rest of the planet, Antarctica’s ice flows from the center out toward the sea, and it takes the meteorites with it. And if the subsurface land beneath the Antarctic ice sheet is just the right topography, these mountains below the ice sheet can sort of boost the ice off and cause it to stop flowing. If that coincides with the place where there's really high velocity winds, all the ice is stripped away from the surface, leaving behind the meteorites. So you get these “accumulation zones” in Antarctica where meteorites pile up in phenomenal numbers—many hundreds of times the normal density of meteorites that you might expect elsewhere on the planet. So since the ‘70s there have been regular expeditions there, and they're still finding them all the time.