Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food Read Free

newer techniques and ingredients simply expand their repertoires, taking their place alongside olive oil, flour, and other pantry staples.
    Spraying a muffin tin on a dishwasher door.
    Mug as plastic bag holder.
    Strainer as splatter guard.
    Roasting peppers in a toaster.
    What does it mean to take the hacking mindset into the kitchen? Sometimes it’s technique. Rolling pizza or pie dough to a uniform thickness by eye can be tricky, but slap a few rubber bands on each end of the rolling pin, and you’ve got an instant guide. Need to pour spices or coffee grinds into a plastic bag? Drop the plastic bag in a mug or cup and fold the edge of the bag over the edge. “Hacking” can apply to the ingredients as well, as you’ll see in Chapter 3 .
    Metal bowl as double boiler.
    Ways of doing things become obvious once you see them. The challenge in the kitchen is to see where you want to go and then find a path that gets you there. Thinking like a hacker means thinking of an end state and then figuring out how to get there in a time- and space-optimal (and fewest-dishes-possible) way.
    How does one go about discovering hacks and tricks in the kitchen? Here’s a thought experiment: imagine you’re given a candle, a book of matches, and a box of nails, and asked to mount the candle on a wall. Without burning down the house, how would you do it?

Functional Fixedness
    The problem just described is called Duncker’s Candle Problem, after Karl Duncker, who studied the cognitive biases that we bring to problems. In this example, things like the paper of the matchbook have a “fixed function” of protecting the matches. We don’t normally think of the matchbook cover as a piece of thick cardboard that’s been folded over; we just see that as part of the matchbook. Recognizing the object as capable of serving other functions requires mental restructuring, something that the scriptwriters for MacGyver excelled at.
    This mental restructuring is something that most geeks are naturally good at. All those interview puzzles common in the tech industry? You know: how would you start a fire with a can of soda and bar of chocolate? [ 1 ] Or, you’re given 12 gold coins and a balance scale, but wait! One of the coins is fake, either lighter or heaver than the others, and the balance scale will magically break after exactly three uses. Problems like these almost invariably come down to breaking functional fixedness and overcoming confirmation bias (here, in the sense of being blinded to new uses by knowing previous uses). The obvious solutions to the candle problem — pushing the nails through the candle or melting the candle so that it sticks to them — will either split the candle or leave it too close to a wall to be safe. The solution, or at least the one Duncker was looking for, involves repurposing the box that had been holding the nails into a shelf. (I’m dreading all the emails I’m going to get with photos of this being done in other ways.)
    Approaches for overcoming functional fixedness in puzzles, code, or the kitchen are the same. Understand what you actually have and what you’re asked to do, break it down into individual steps, and explore different possibilities for each discrete step. Take the quest for the perfect cup of coffee: can you isolate the variables for bean grind, temperature, pressure, etc. and then explore the combinations in a controlled way, varying just one variable at a time? Think about the ingredients you’re starting with and the end state you want, as opposed to the straight execution of a recipe. This way, when the execution inevitably veers off course, you can understand the step you are at and how to catch and correct the exception. Of course, be open to other possible outcomes — the way a meal turns out will sometimes be different than what you originally conceived.
    Thinking about the end state will also help broaden how you think about cooking more generally. Cooking is not just about food