Kitchen myth busting
When it comes to the kitchen many of us get surprisingly little of our knowledge from cooking classes or recipe books. Often the knowledge we swear by is the knowledge passed around by word of mouth, whether it’s the secret to cooking decent rice as your mum taught you, or the simple trick your flatmate at university taught you to make sure your curry sauce always come out right.

The trouble is that with word of mouth you can often get a lot of misconceptions and misinformation mixed in with the genuinely healthy recipes and invaluable kitchen tips. So persistent are some of these ideas that even top chefs will swear by them, but a little research shows there is often not much truth behind the myth.

Today we’re going to look behind some of the most commonly known rules about cooking that don’t stand up to examination. Rules such as:
You should sear meat to keep the moisture inside
This tip dates back to world famous chef Auguste Escoffier. Escoffier wasn't just any celebrity chef, we was renowned throughout the industry. His cook book wasn't just a recipe book, but a textbook used in cooking schools. He was a passionate advocate for searing meat in order to keep the moisture in. It’s advice that stuck, and whether you're cooking at home or eating out at a high end restaurant, if meat is on the menu the chances are it’s going to be seared early on.

If you try searing yourself it's easy to see the results. Searing creates a tough, dry crust on the outside of your meat, and when you bite into it you get to the juicy meat within.

This would be all the proof you need except for the fact the meat only seems juicier on the inside, thanks to the great big dry crust on the outside. Chef and food scientist Alton Brown conducted tests, cooking similar pieces of meat, one seared, one not, until they both reached the same internal temperate. The conclusion of his experiment?

Searing the meat actually reduces the amount of moisture inside.
Your bread goes stale when it loses moisture
This is another myth that seems to pass the taste test. If you’ve left some bread out for too long, when you come back and try to bite into it the bread tastes dry and hard. Before it was soft and fluffy and, yes, moist. It’s not hard to see how the moisture evaporating from the bread could lead it to be that way.

Actually this is the complete opposite of what really happened. Bread goes stale because it’s got too much moisture, not too little. The water causes the starches in the bread to crystallise, resulting in just the sort of stiff, crumbly bread that’s not good for sandwiches.
If you cook vegetables they’re less nutritious
Unlike the other two myths in this article, which you believe just because they seem to feel right, this one actually has some sort of scientific backing. When you cook vegetables their enzymes die. That’s high school level science- enzymes die when they’re exposed to extreme temperatures. So that means eating raw vegetables must be better for you than eating cooked vegetables, right?

The problem here is that enzymes aren't the bit of the vegetable that’s good for you. They help the plant grow, but human beings have their own enzymes for the sort of thing – such as the very enzymes that’ll help you digest the vegetables in the first place. So cook your vegetables all you like, they’ll still be every bit as healthy as they were when you started.


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Kitchen myth busting