Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes

by McLagan, Jennifer

• ISBN13: 9781580089357
• ISBN10: 1580089356
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-09-01
• Publisher: Random House Inc

Summary

McLagan knows and loves cooking fat, and offers more than 100 sweet and savory recipes that utilize this misunderstood ingredient. Sumptuous food photos throughout make for a satisfying read for food lovers.

Author Biography

JENNIFER McLAGAN is a chef and sought-after food stylist and writer who has worked in London and Paris as well as her native Australia. Her first book, Bones (2005), was widely acclaimed, winning the James Beard award for single subject food writing. She is a regular contributor to Fine Cooking and Food & Drink. She has lived in Toronto for more than twenty-seven years with her sculptor husband, Haralds Gaikis, with whom she escapes to Paris as often as possible. On both sides of the Atlantic, Jennifer maintains friendly relations with her butchers, who put aside their best fat and bones for her.

THE AUTHOR SCOOP 

What was the hardest thing about writing a book?
Wondering if anyone other than your editor will read it.
 
Favorite cocktail?
Gin and tonic in the summer but it must be Hendricks with a slice of cucumber. In winter an Americano – red martini, campari, soda and a slice of lemon.
 
What food could you not live without?
Fat of course - all sorts of animal fat.
 
Name the most horrifying dish that your mother used to make.
Tripe in white sauce onions – I hated it. Now I love tripe but not in white sauce.
 
How did you learn to cook?
My first introduction was taking a course in French language. The course was taught by cooking French recipes written in French, so I have lots of food and cooking vocabulary.

Excerpts

1

Butter: Worth It

What could be better than a slice of fresh bread slathered with butter? Rich, buttery shortbread, perhaps? A fish doused in a bath of brown butter and capers? Or simple pan juices enriched with a swirl of butter? In the kitchen, butter is a tasty and very useful fat. Butter melts at just below body temperature, giving it a luscious sensation on the tongue, and it imparts a rich, creamy taste. Just a little butter adds flavor to everything we eat. Butter is also an excellent flavor carrier: spike it with garlic and herbs or sugar and orange and it delivers those flavors to everything it touches.

Butter is unique in the world of fat. Unlike other animal fats, it doesn’t require that we kill an animal to obtain it, and without us it wouldn’t exist. But just whatisbutter, exactly? The science behind the transformation of liquid milk into a solid fat is not completely understood. Anyone who has been distracted while whipping cream knows how quickly it can turn to butter. Whipped too long, cream changes from a stable foam into a combination of fatty globules and a watery liquid, or buttermilk. Those fatty globules are not pure fat, but an emulsion of butterfat, water, and milk solids. The fat content of butter is naturally about 82 percent–this is the European standard for butter–although it can range up to 86 percent, depending on the cow and its diet. In North America, butter’s minimum fat content is set at 80 percent, so water is often added to lower the butterfat to the legal minimum. What’s in the other 20 percent of butter? Mostly water–around 18 percent, which explains the sizzle when butter hits a hot pan–and the rest is milk solids. Those milk solids will burn in the pan if the butter gets too hot, which is why butter is not the best fat for frying.

Butter is a very complex fat, containing more than 500 fatty acids and 400 volatile compounds, all of which determine its flavor. The breed of cow, its diet, and the season all affect the taste, texture, and look of butter. Most of us have forgotten that butter, like many foods, is seasonal. In spring and early summer, butter is a deeper yellow because the cows eat grass at this time of year, which has a high percentage of orange and yellow carotenes. The pasture is also filled with herbs and flowers, which gives the butter floral and herbal notes. In winter, the cow’s diet is supplemented with silage, so the butter is pale, higher in fat, firmer, and milder in taste. There is a direct link between what the cow eats and the flavor of its butter, but most of us have never tasted herbs or flowers in our butter.

Before the advent of refrigeration, butter shipped to towns and cities was highly salted to preserve it, but it still often went rancid and was sometimes adulterated. Only those who lived in the countryside and churned their own enjoyed the taste of fresh butter. Thankfully, our butter is no longer adulterated, since it is highly regulated and mass-produced, but the same system that guarantees a certain standard also results in a uniformity in both the butter’s color and (lack of) flavor. Our butter is often frozen for long periods of time and may be months old before reaching the store. Butter’s delicate flavor is so easily overwhelmed that most of us don’t know what good, fresh butter from grass-fed cows tastes like.

Good butter is smooth, unctuous, and creamy under the knife and bursts with myriad flavors in the mouth. These flavors, which range from clean, delicate, and sweet to tangy, ripe, and complex, are determined by the taste of the cream and how it is handled and churned. Butter made with fresh cream is milder in flavor, so it is often called “sweet.” It is not sweet like sugar, but it has none of the tang and depth of cultured butter. Cultured butter is made from ripened cream, or cream that has lac

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Excerpted from Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes by Jennifer McLagan
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