👨‍🍳 Cooking at Home - What I Learned from David Chang

🔪 Professional cooking vs. home cooking

Let’s cut through the complexities and highlight why professional cooking doesn’t always fit the bill for home cooks.

Cooking at home and in restaurants is worlds apart, and there are some misconceptions when trying to replicate restaurant recipes. About half of what you see in home cooking is inspired by fine dining concepts, but the rest is just practical, whatever-works-best kind of stuff.

Professional kitchen cooking doesn’t always translate to your home kitchen because of the focus on high volume, knife cuts, and using specific, sometimes rare, ingredients. That level of detail isn’t always useful for home cooks.

So embrace that home and restaurant cooking are not the same. Cooking at home is about simplicity, efficiency, and making delicious meals without unnecessary stress.

🪄 Microwave is a magical tool

The microwave is culinary arbitrage… you press a button, and things get hot. It’s arguably the most underutilized tool in your kitchen and the one that will make home cooking so much easier.

How it works

Inside a microwave is a generator called a magnetron which converts electricity into electromagnetic waves (i.e., microwaves). The microwaves penetrate your food which causes the food molecules to vibrate and generate heat.

The microwaves are not harmful. Here’s a snippet from a GoodRx article that relies on primary sources such as medical organizations, governmental agencies, academic institutions, and peer-reviewed scientific journals:

What is dangerous is plastics in the microwave. Stick with silicone, heat-proof glass, ceramic (depending on the glaze), and paper products like plates, napkins, or parchment paper.

Benefits

Besides being the tool that makes home cooking easier, using a microwave has benefits over ovens and stovetops.

• Energy-efficient way to cook: It will cook in less time and with less water
• Keeps food nutrient dense: Less water means less transfer of nutrients
• Cooks cleaner: You don’t have to add oils or fats to cook
• Uses less dishware: The dishware used to cook in the microwave (like Anyday cookware) can be the same for storage and serving

Wattage and power level

Understanding your wattage is the key to getting to know your microwave.

The problem is that every microwave will be different, and you can screw up a recipe if you don’t dial it in. Here’s a way you can test to determine the wattage of your microwave oven, regardless of what it says in the owner’s manual: the time to boil test.

The second thing people don’t use correctly is the power levels.

​Power levels change the time of cooking, not the strength.

By default, the microwave cooks at the maximum level, which means the microwaves are applied the entire time it's on. Also, microwaves penetrate only 1 inch of any food. So when the power level is high, the outside of your food can get overcooked while the inside is not.

For example, “power level 30” means for every minute, only 30% of the time microwaves are being used. So use this as a rule of thumb for power levels.

• High power is best used for liquids and foods less than ½ inch thick
• Medium power is best for items that cannot be stirred, like chicken or lasagna (melt butter at this power, too)
• Low power is best for dairy, grains, delicate sauces, and defrosting

Food that works well in the microwave

Foods that use steam or water for cooking are good options (so long as they don’t require hours of cooking).

Some of David’s recommendations include:

• Lobster 🦞
• Vegetables 🥦
• Pasta 🍝
• Gravy 🧉
• Fish 🐟

Cookware designed for the microwave

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In my conversation with David, we talked a bit about Anyday, the company he partnered with to create the best microwave cookware. In fact, I’ve been using it for the past month, and I’m thoroughly impressed. It’s a bit surreal to be able to cook entire meals for 5 in one dish in the microwave, but we’ve now made Dave Chang’s Salmon Rice on three occasions, and it’s so easy to make, tastes so good, and with only one dish, it’s so easy to clean up!

Even better, I reached out to the Anyday team to set up a 15% off discount for All the Hacks subscribers, so if you want to check it out, you can use this link.

Even better, if you’re an All the Hacks member, you can get 20% off with the code on the member site. Or if you’re not a member and want to join, you can do that here.

🥶 Quality matters – try frozen

Let’s start with fish.

Three factors can impact the quality.

• When it was caught
• How it was handled
• How it was stored

Unless the person selling the fish is the one that caught, handled, and stored it, it’s hard to be certain. Human error happens in transfers. It’s why David suggests you consider frozen fish over fresh fish at the supermarket (or wherever you buy your fish).

Frozen fish can be a better option because it’s typically flash-frozen at its peak freshness, and you don’t have to worry about human error in handling and storage as much.

Does that mean frozen is always better? No.

But as he put it, fresh fish has a higher upside but a lower downside than frozen fish. If you are going the fresh fish route, he suggests buying it from places you trust how it’s handled.

The same can be true for some fruits and vegetables, like berries and peas, as they are harvested at their sweetest and quickly frozen to preserve flavor and nutrients.

🍱 Impactful ingredients

Olive oil is a smart (and healthy) meal addition

Olive oil comes in various flavors and smoke points, making it a versatile addition to your kitchen.

David always has three olive oils on hand, using lower quality olive oils for cooking because the fragile compounds that make it delicious get destroyed in the violent heating process. He reserves the more delicate, fragrant, or fruity ones for drizzling dressing and other non-heated uses.

Besides, olive oil has excellent health benefits, including healthy fats, antioxidants, and anti-inflammatory properties.

Spices are essential to home cooking

When was the last time you replaced the spices on your spice rack?

• Five years?
• Ten years?
• Did you keep the spices from the previous homeowner?

The flavor of spices degrades over time.

Instead of purchasing bulk quantities for everything, buy small amounts of certain spices to avoid waste and ensure freshness. Spices are an amazing way to unlock flavor for home cooking.

MSG is misunderstood

One of the interesting things I learned from David is that MSG is often misunderstood and unfairly criticized (he has yet to find solid scientific evidence proving it’s harmful).

Per the FDA, “MSG (monosodium glutamate) is the sodium salt of the common amino acid glutamic acid. Glutamic acid is naturally present in our bodies and in many foods and food additives.”

The artificial form is what people think about, but MSG is also natural. Take dry-aged beef; dry-aging produces and harnesses glutamic acid as a key part of its aging process.

Whether you realize it or not, many delicious snacks and dishes contain MSG, including Chick-Fil-A chicken sandwiches, your favorite bag of Doritos, and even the chicken bouillon cubes used for cooking.

While some people might be sensitive to MSG, embracing it in moderation can unlock umami flavors and enrich your cooking.

🧑‍🍳 Unleash your inner foodie

While this newsletter is about cooking from home, I’d miss a huge opportunity not to ask a world-renowned chef about restaurants.

Here are two things David recommended when finding a place to eat out:

• Look for the places people love or hate - The hidden gems are the restaurants where the Yelp rating doesn't reflect the restaurant. David suggests you look for places with an average of rating of 3 but comprised of all 1s and 5s (not just all 3s). These are the places that could be amazing or absolutely terrible...Roll the dice...you never know.
• Trust the foodie influencers - Instagram is a great curation tool. You have these influencers and creators where all they do is research and deep dive into where to eat. This means you have instant information, and someone is doing your homework. All you need to do is to find the right people to trust and follow their lead.

🍽️ Simple kitchen hacks

I asked David for a few kitchen hacks to save time and frustration:

• Skip peeling carrots – wash them thoroughly with a clean sponge for easy prep (also there's good flavor in the skin)
• Peel ginger with a spoon – and if those tight crevices and knobs start to anger you, wash it instead
• Treat the fat as a friend – don’t assume you need to trim the fat off a chicken breast or thighs
• Use the freezer more often – it’s the best way to preserve and ensure quality

Here are some of the ones Amy and I have learned along the way:

• Use distilled white vinegar for berries – bathe berries for 30 seconds to 1 minute in a distilled white vinegar and water mix (1:4 parts ratio vinegar to water), then let them dry and store in the fridge for longer freshness
• Keep cookies chewy by storing them with a slice of bread – it will keep them softer for longer
• Get a good pair of kitchen scissors - it makes cutting food so much easier (especially with kids)
• Keep a sharpie next to the fridge – write dates on everything and eliminate the guesswork if your food is still good or not
• Make extra and freeze in portions – for things like pasta sauce or chicken broth, you can freeze in portioned sizes and save yourself time in the future

I’ll share one more from an All the Hacks subscriber:

• Buy bulk meat from local farmers - Every year, Maxine fills a 9 cu ft chest freezer with various whole animal meat purchases. It saves time and money and adds a layer of convenience and quality assurance. Then she just "shops her freezer.” She even wrote the book on how you can do this yourself!

👨‍👩‍👧‍👧 Get your kids to eat more

All you want to do as a parent is seeing your kid eat.

The trick is to prevent boredom.

If they see the same food the same way, at some point, they are going to push it away. So, find a way to make the same food differently.

For David, it’s the crepe. He says, “It’s the only thing left in my pitching arsenal that [my kids] still can’t hit.”

The beauty of the crepe is its dynamic. Add an egg, fold it over, make it crunchier, mix it with fruit, add bacon, or chop it up. If it’s not the crepe for you – find the versatile foods you can use to do the trick.

Here’s how you can make the crepes:

• Use the ratio of 1 egg to 1 cup of milk to 1 cup of flour
• Mix it in a blender with a bit of olive oil (or some kind of butter)
• Pour into a nonstick pan on medium heat (try to get it as thin as possible – but don’t worry about being perfect)
• Then do what you want with it…

🥘 Favorite Recipes

Since this is a newsletter all about food, I thought I’d also share some of our favorite recipes to cook at home (though with Green Chef covering 3 of our meals each week, we’re planning meals a lot less). Also, if you’re wondering how I keep all these recipes organized, we do all our recipe organization and meal planning with the Paprika app.

• ​Dave Chang’s Salmon Rice (video above)
• ​Crispy Tacos Dorados​
• ​Coconut-Miso Salmon Curry​
• ​Lemon Ricotta Pancakes​
• ​Korean Beef Tacos with Sriracha Slaw​
• ​Mapo Ragù​
• ​Pad Thai​
• ​Raspberry-Mochi Butter Cake with Matcha Glaze​
• ​Turmeric-Black Pepper Chicken with Asparagus​
• ​Thai-Inspired Chicken Meatball Soup​
• ​Roasted Salmon with Gochujang Mayo​
• ​Basque Burnt Cheesecake​
• ​Spiced Chickpea Stew with Coconut and Turmeric

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