9 Ridiculous Cooking Myths You Probably Believe
We don't expect all of our readers to know everything about cooking. At least some of our readers probably aren't expert chefs (though, yes, we assume that most are). It's OK if everyone doesn't know how to properly prepare a blowfish, or how to pair the right wine with the right dinner. You're not a master chef by any means, but you still know a few basic food truths, right?
Well guess what: You're wrong about those, too.
#9. Bread Gets Stale Because It Loses Its Moisture
The sandwich is, without question, the best thing ever discovered by man (suck it, penicillin!), and bread is the most dedicated soldier in the sandwich's army. Bread makes it possible for loose meats and stray condiments to transcend their differences, to come together and celebrate their tastiness in an organized and mutually beneficial fashion. It brings order to your fridge; without the bread's stern but fair confines, what would keep your deli meats in line? Or your peanut butter and jelly? You'd have to just eat a spoonful of peanut butter and then desperately chase it with a shot of jelly. You'd be pounding fistfuls of various meats into your maw and chugging Grey Poupon just to feel something. Bread fixes all that and keeps your food safe and easily transportable. It's like an edible envelope that mails food letters straight to your mouth.
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Time for FedEx overnight.
That's why coming home to a loaf of stale bread is absolutely the single worst thing in life (suck it, AIDS!). You've got your meats, your cheeses, your oils and vinegars, but the bread is hard and brittle and utterly incapable of inspiring order in anything. It's dry. You must not have sealed the bag, or maybe you left the bread out on the counter in the sun, thereby robbing it of all of its sweet, precious moisture. Surely that's what happened, right?
The Reality:
Wrong. When your loaf becomes stale, it's not because it's dried out; the opposite is actually true. When bread gets too much moisture, the starches in the bread start to crystallize, making the bread tough and crumbly. Maybe you know some people who store bread in their refrigerator to prevent it from going stale. Those people are not your friends. Low temperatures actually help to speed up the crystallization process, like baguette Viagra.
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It's too late for this loaf. Just look away now. Look away.
#8. Lobsters Scream When Boiled
OK, you can't make a sandwich because all of your bread is stale, so you've decided to make a nice lobster (often called "the sandwich of the sea") instead. There are so many ways to cook a lobster, but because you're still furious that the universe robbed you of your bread, you need to take your anger out on something. You've been told your whole life that lobsters scream when you boil them, so that's what you'll do. You need to boil a small sea creature alive just to hear it scream. That's you. (In this hypothetical, you are a sociopath.)
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Be honest. Half of you are cackling right now.
The Reality:
Except it isn't screaming. That sound you hear is actually steam escaping the lobster's shell. When you toss a lobster into a pot of boiling water, steam builds up in the recesses of its shell and it has nowhere to go but out, much like a tea kettle. A delicious, expensive tea kettle.
Not only is it not screaming, your lobster isn't even all that pissed off at you, because its nervous system isn't very complex, so it's feeling little to no pain. So now you can't get a sandwich AND you can't even satisfy yourself with the tortured screams of a defenseless creature. What a sad day for you (you lunatic).
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Now this is just a useless pot of untortured meat.
#7. Searing Meat Seals in Moisture
Sometimes you just have to take a look at your life and say, "Steak, steak steak steak, steak, it's time for steak, steak steak, it's steak time." You've got a big steak and an even bigger appetite. But you don't want to just broil the steak or eat it raw. That sonofabitching steak has been marinating for 48 hours; you need to preserve those juices, you want to be able to jab a straw into that steak and drink those juices straight up. And how do you do that? Well, because you're cultured, you know that searing is the best way to preserve juices, a tip you learned in one of Auguste Escoffier's cookbooks. Escoffier was one of the most famous chefs of all time (once called "the king of chefs and the chef of kings"), and he swore by searing. His cookbook is still used today, but not as a cookbook -- as a damned textbook in the school of cooking. He must know a thing or two, so if he says searing preserves juices, you are going to fire up the grill and slap the meat right down on it as hard as you motherfucking can. Those juices will be yours.
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Somebody should bottle that shit into a soda.
Or maybe you can't cook at all. Maybe you went out to a restaurant to have someone else sear something for you, a nice tuna or swordfish, or perhaps some seared chicken nuggets, if the restaurant is particularly fancy. You don't care what you eat, as long as it's juicy, and that means you need some searing going on.
The Reality:
Not by a long shot. Searing meat doesn't do a goddamn thing to keep juices inside. When you sear your steak, you're actually creating a tougher crust on the outside of the cut, which just makes the inside seem juicier by comparison. That great chef Auguste Escoffier whose work is still used as a reference today? He's not just wrong, he's dead wrong. (Also? Dead.)
"I'll haunt your food! French toast? More like French ghost! I'm so lonely."
Meanwhile, the totally alive renowned chef and food scientist (?) Alton Brown did an experiment testing the myth, and he found that searing meat causes it to lose more moisture than meat that hasn't been seared. So the next time you want your steak to be juicy, don't get rough with it. Show it some love and cook it ever so gently.
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Alton Brown, serious scientist.
#6. Alcohol Completely Evaporates When Cooked in Food
Penne with vodka sauce. Chicken Marsala. Rum cake. They're all delicious and they're all made even more exciting thanks to their loose associations with alcohol. Sure, you'll never get drunk while eating something that has vodka sauce on it, because all of the actual alcohol gets cooked off, but you still appreciate that, at some point, alcohol was involved, even though it's gone now.
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Now all we need is a Coca-Cola cake.
It is gone, right? Surely the alcohol has been cooked off or evaporated away or ... something. We need an answer on this, people, we let children eat penne with vodka. We're not feeding our children alcohol noodles, are we?
The Reality:
Yep! Depending on the method of cooking, the heat and the time the food is left sitting, up to 85 percent of the alcohol can remain. Even if the alcohol is put into boiling water, it can still retain its intoxicating qualities. For alcohol to completely cook out of food, it needs to be cooked for upward of three hours. Go ahead and look online and through every cookbook available; you will not find a single recipe for vodka sauce, Marsala wine sauce or rum cake that suggests you cook for three freaking hours. Unless you cook your beer-battered onion rings for three cool hours, you'll be ever so slightly on your way to a nice buzz.
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Warning: Whiskey-battered cheese ball vomit is caustic enough to melt linoleum.
If you want an alcohol-free pasta dinner for 7 o'clock, that's totally fine. Just make sure you start cooking at 4.
#5. Cooking in a Microwave Destroys Nutrients
You're hungry as all hell, but still a little bit hungover from last night's penne, so you're just not feeling up to cooking. You decide that you're going to pop some leftovers into the microwave. After you press the "Start" button, you remember something you've heard a million times: Cooking your food in a microwave destroys all the precious nutrients that that food has. So, now you're going to lose all the vitamins and minerals in your leftover lobster sandwich and pizza rolls thanks to that goddamn nuclear box, right?
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"Time to turn this into cardboard!"
The Reality:
Wrong. Cooking in a microwave doesn't start a war on nutrients any more than cooking on the stovetop or in your oven does. In fact, microwave cooking helps to preserve nutrients more than other methods of cooking.
Because microwave cooking often consists of less heat and shorter cooking times than more conventional cooking methods, it actually does the least amount of damage when it comes to nutrients.
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Above: The most damage.
So, while cooking in your microwave probably won't cook everything in the way that you want it, it will keep those Hot Pockets nice and, uh ... healthy.
Some big misses here. Take #3 - pouring oil on the water after putting the pasta in doesn't make *much* difference (except for pasta bubbling up through the surface) but it's *before* which is reputed to make the difference. The "authoritative" source looks anything *but*, and the article's point spends most of its time on sauce-catching capabilities, ignoring - incidentally - that many sauces are actually quite oily. Many pestos, for example, are seriously oil-based, which means they'll stick *better* to oily pasta.
ReplyCooking vegetables destroys some nutrients (vitamin C, for example) and renders some more accessible (lycopene, for example).
The literature on microwave cooking is also somewhat mixed. Under some conditions, a microwave will destroy more nutrients; under other conditions, it will destroy fewer.
Boo, Cracked, for approving this unfortunately under-researched article.
"this article made you absolutely starving", I literally got up and made a sandwich half way through reading.
Replybread is awesome
how are any of those "ridiculous?" common misconceptions and ridiculous myths are 2 totally different things
ReplyDid the author ever stop to think that maybe the trichinosis outbreaks went down because people started cooking the meat to the right temp, not because of industry standards?
ReplyJust use the stale bread to make french toast. Problem solved.
ReplyI always thought it was about keeping the pasta from sticking to the pan, not themselves;and I thought it salt that was doing that job. And then you would rinse the pasta to keep it from sticking to itself, just like someone else said....
Replyhah, little iffy on the microwave, not saying it kills nutrition, but it is there is a reason why the are called that. That box use microwaves to excite the water molecules causing them to speed up, heating the food it is in. Honestly though i have read so many contradictions on this topic i don't know what is really true (why i feel iffy), but using waves, even though though it is the lower side of the electromagnetic spectrum (lower than light), it still is heating much faster than direct heat, i just wonder what change could be happening, but that is not enough to keep me from using it. Though nutrients may not be lost, taste is, but a better thing that to know is that they don't actually cook food, just warm it. Also about salt, it is right. there are many kind of salts, but i'm talking about chemical differences, NaCl is just one type. definition: ionic compounds that result from the neutralization reaction of an acid and a base. an example would be MgSO_4 (Magnesium sulfate). Though so far cooking hasn't been to hard for me, I can cook quite a few different meals, just follow the instructions and stay in the kitchen.
ReplyHey guy I think the definition you gave is referring more to organic chemistry :-p In this article the author IS only referring to the one specific salt, NaCl. However, as he explains, the different style, or forms, of preparation the salt comes in is a very important factor in cooking. Think about like with sugar, how you have powdered, granulated, cubed :-p ) etc...
All of the information in this article regarding raw food and the health of raw food being a fad is not only incorrect but it is outdated and some of the studies have either been funded by the FDA (an american organisation that is more corrupt than the banking crisis culprits) or they have paid the company's that have done the study enough so that they never speak again.
ReplyDon't get me wrong I love cracked articles and most of them are informative and true but I'm afraid to say that this one is incorrect.
Look into the information on raw food yourselves.. And actually, I'm sure I have seen an article on here that discredits the FDA and now you cite studies funded by the FDA and claim them to be valid agaist your myth busting paragraph of raw food.
Sorry if you are just doing your job but Cracked is about fun AND facts.
Good Day.
Incorporating raw foods into one's diet is great, but I think the article was getting more at the idea that you can still be healthy from eating cooked foods too. After all, you wouldn't eat meat raw, would you?
I'm fairly certain they didn't say anywhere up there "EAT RAW MEAT, THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT."
A medium rare pork chop is not raw.
Perfect pasta is very simple, boil water, add salt, add pasta, cook it for 13 to 17 minutes and after that, add cold water to stop cooking it, then add the sauce, not too much sauce, just enough to give taste and a little coating to the pasta... if you make a cold salad and don't want your pasta to stick, just rinse the pasta with cold water after cooking and that's it, never use oil...
ReplyOf course I'm starving now! *Yells at Sandwich slaveboy to do his job.*
ReplyThanks Cracked, I'm hungry as hell now
ReplyThe jury is still out on whether or not crustaceans can feel pain. There have been a number of studies which occurred after the cited ABC article from 7 years ago which suggest that lobsters and their cousins are capable of pain. It's probably safest just to assume that all food suffers, and should be enjoyed accordingly.
ReplyThe last sentence of this comment made me far happier than I have any sane right to be. Thank you!
Whoever wrote this has never cooked pasta, obviously.
ReplyIn college if I had time I would make my tex-mex eggs with a splash of tequila, believing that the alcohol would burn off. Guess I was wrong about that, but man at least I went to class happy!
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ReplyIt's interesting about the alcohol thing... everyone I know believes it. I did too until just now.
ReplyI think I believed about one or two of these. We were always told growing up that uneaten bread in the fridge would go stale and uneaten bread on the bench would go moldy, for example, and cooking vegetables (whether in a microwave or not) killing nutrients was always an urban legend.
ReplyThe stale bread thing makes sense because mold grows in moist environments and you couldn't have bread be both stale AND moldy if it were completely dried out.
Yeah, bread will go stale in the fridge and mouldy on the bench, that's why I keep it in the freezer. Neither problem happens. Thaw it out in the microwave and the frozen bread is just fine weeks later.
not only does cooking vegetables not destroy nutrients, but(depending on the vegetable and how exactly its cooked) it can make the veggies easier to digest so your body can absorb more nutrients from them.
ReplyAmazing how so much of this article (about half, I'd guess) is incorrect or just flat-out BS. Exactly the opposite of its premise. Not good.
ReplyCare to actually refute it, or do you just not like having your urban myths dispelled?
Clearly you've done some serious research. I read through all of the examples you produced, and my only conclusion is that you must be right.
While oil won't keep pasta from sticking together if you add it to the water, if you add a bit after you've already cooked and drained the pasta, it works wonders.
ReplyYes, this method *will* actually stop the pasta from sticking together. It still carries the problem of preventing the sauce from sticking to the pasta though.
True, but you could always just add a nice flavorful oil, some salt and pepper and maybe some parmigiano-reggiano cheese, and you don't need a sauce.