2466: 4 Cooking Tips That Will End Your Recipe Guessing by Chef Todd Mohr with Ben Greenfield Fitness

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[00:01:09] Four cooking tips that will end your recipe guessing by Chef Todd Moore with Ben Greenfield Fitness.com and I'm Dr. Neal, your host and narrator. Welcome back to another episode of Optimal Health Daily.

[00:01:22] This is where I read to you from some of the best health and fitness blogs on the web, kind of like an ongoing audiobook and always with a bit of my commentary at the end.

[00:01:31] Now today is Wednesday and like I do every Wednesday, I like to share a little bit of inspiration with you. So with that, here we go. Optimism is an attitude that people can choose to have. Anyone can have it. Dr. Bob Rotella.

[00:01:48] Alright now that we're in the right frame of mind and feeling optimistic, let's get right to it as we optimize your life. Four cooking tips that will end your recipe guessing by Chef Todd Moore with Ben Greenfield Fitness.com. Cooking is not made easy when you're still guessing.

[00:02:10] In fact, guessing at cooking increases the stress because guessing makes you unsure of the results to come. I'm going to give you a little cooking help by offering some tips on how to end your guessing.

[00:02:22] One of the reasons that you guess is because it's hard to believe something until you can actually see it. But I want to help you to wrap your head around the idea that you have to believe it first and then you'll see it.

[00:02:35] Quantifying your portion sizes, temperature, and testing are great ways to allow you to stop guessing. Let's go ahead and look at how that might work. Four ways to quantify your cooking and eliminate guessing. Cooking tip number one, temperature. Temperature is important in cooking.

[00:02:54] Some foods will make you sick if you don't cook them at the right temperature. Other foods will be utterly destroyed if you cook them much above what's considered medium heat. Use water as an indicator of temperature.

[00:03:07] Water evaporates at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, so if you're using a saute pan, if you sprinkle a little water in the pan and it evaporates, you know that the pan is at least at the boiling point of water. The quicker the water evaporates, the hotter your pan is.

[00:03:23] This works on the grill as well. You can also test a small piece of your food to test for temperature. For example, maybe you're going to fry some chicken and oil on the stove, but you can't tell if the oil is hot enough or not.

[00:03:36] Don't ruin a whole chicken breast by putting it into oil that's not hot enough. Instead, take a small piece of the chicken and drop it in the pan. You'll know right away whether the oil is hot enough or not to cook your food. Cooking Tip Number 2.

[00:03:52] Test a small quantity. Sometimes you just need to test a small quantity of something before cooking the whole thing. This is especially helpful when roasting. I can tell you that when I had my catering business, sometimes we would

[00:04:05] have to make hundreds or thousands of crab cakes in one big batch. Well, we would take one crab cake, cook it and test it. This would allow us to make adjustments on the rest of the batch and make a superior product.

[00:04:20] Cooking or roasting a small piece of something is a great way to see if your plan is going to work without sacrificing all of your ingredients during one of your guessing adventures. Cooking Tip Number 3. Portion Size. Get a digital scale and begin to understand your raw portion sizes.

[00:04:38] Let me tell you a story about how I discovered the importance of this tip. When I used to make spaghetti for myself and my partner, I would cook a whole pound of spaghetti. Basically, one whole box for the two of us.

[00:04:51] When we sat down to eat, because so much spaghetti was available, we ate more than we should. After finishing our meal, there was always spaghetti left over. We would put the leftover spaghetti in the refrigerator and a few days later throw it out because we wouldn't eat it.

[00:05:08] With my digital scale, I started weighing 8 ounces of dry pasta for the two of us. I cooked the 8 ounces and still had some leftover, so I adjusted it down until I knew exactly how much dry pasta to cook for the two of us. 5.3 ounces is our perfect amount.

[00:05:28] Knowing this finally made cooking pasta easy. We don't overeat and we don't have leftovers. Understanding and knowing your portion sizes will also help you to not overbuy at the grocery store because you'll know exactly how much to buy of

[00:05:43] a product to feed your family for a particular meal. And make sure you stick to the portion sizes. If you're cooking frozen shrimp from a bag and the portions end up leaving three shrimp in the bag, don't just dump them into the meal and cook them.

[00:05:58] No, you'll be feeding too much to your family. Leave them in the bag and cook them the next time. You don't have to just make the whole package each time. And cooking tip number four, test spices.

[00:06:12] If you're making a pot of something and you need to add spices, don't start throwing in the spices and guess what it's going to taste like. Get the spices that you're thinking about using and put the spice concoction in a small ramekin or a small souffle cup first.

[00:06:28] This will help you to know how the flavors work and give you the confidence that the combination is going to work. So by using these quantifying cooking tips, you can stop guessing at what's happening to your food, observe your results and purposely alter your steps for the

[00:06:43] next time. You will be amazed at how starting with these little visual cues can help you to stop guessing and feel confident that what you see is what you believe will be true. This isn't guessing. This is cooking made easy.

[00:07:02] You just listened to the post titled, four cooking tips that will end your recipe guessing by Chef Todd Moore with Ben Greenfield Fitness.com and I'll be right back with my commentary. Dr. Neal here for my commentary. I loved all of Chef Moore's suggestions.

[00:07:18] Now I want to go back to the point Chef Moore made about cooking foods to their proper temperatures. It can get confusing because the temperatures are different depending on the type of food. I'll try and reduce some of the confusion now.

[00:07:31] When cooking chicken or turkey, the internal temperature should reach at least 165 degrees Fahrenheit or 74 degrees Celsius. When ordering a dish that has chicken or turkey in it, you never want to order either as rare or medium. They should always be well done.

[00:07:52] When cooking ground meats like when cooking a hamburger patty, the internal temperature doesn't have to be as high as 165 degrees Fahrenheit. Instead, 155 to 160 degrees Fahrenheit or 68 to 71 degrees Celsius will do just fine. When cooking pork, we can keep the internal temperature even lower 145 degrees Fahrenheit or 63 degrees Celsius.

[00:08:20] Now I should mention that the most accurate way to measure the internal temperature of cooked foods is to use a food thermometer. When using a food thermometer, make sure that it's clean of course. Then place it in the thickest part of the food.

[00:08:36] Make sure that the end of the thermometer doesn't end up touching bone or fat when you're measuring the temperature. Hitting the temperatures I just described will reduce the chances of getting a bacterial or viral infection from the food. All right, that'll do it for today.

[00:08:52] I hope you have a great rest of your day. And of course, I'll see you back here on tomorrow's show where your optimal life awaits.