SXSWORLD

Approach to Cooking By Jason Cohen pre-cooked crusts with sauce packets. Homemade toppings over raw dough from the grocery store. Or creating everything from scratch—perhaps including sausage and fresh mozzarella. But even foodies who are comfortable with meat grinders and rennet rarely go as far as SXSW Interactive panelist Jeff Potter, who broke the lock on his oven (warranty be damned!) to make pizza in the cleaning cycle, which runs at the more crust-friendly, brick-oven- simulating temperature of 900º F. Sure, the glass pane on his oven door even- tually imploded from repeated thermal shock, but all hacks demand on-the-fly adjustment—it was easy enough to order a custom cut piece of PyroCeram, which is rated to 1400º F. "It's the same stuff they used on missile nose cones in the 1950s," says Potter, a computer sci- entist by training who has worked for various companies and start-ups around Cambridge, Massachusetts. "It's amazing what you can buy on the Internet. And it didn't even cost that much!" Potter's DIY pizza perfection, which taying home and making pizza" can mean lots of things. Frozen. One of those "S Jeff Potter and The Mad Scientist's Potter. "So, what would happen if we took our oven to 900 degrees? Can we make a pizza in 45 seconds? Yeah, actu- ally you can. And what would happen if you took some liquid nitrogen and mixed it with chocolate, cream and sugar? Will you get ice cream? Yeah, actually you do." Just remember that said ice cream Jeff Potter was inspired by the Atlanta home-cook- turned-pizzeria-owner Jeff Varasano (see his 20,000 word recipe at varasanos. com), is one of many culinary odys- seys explored in his forthcoming book, Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food. The way Potter sees it, many a great cook comes from the same place as "hackers, makers, geeks and nerds—people that obsess about the details," he says. "There's that whole mental toolbox of hacks and tricks. The set of skills that a geek uses in front of a keyboard is the same set of skills that a geek can use in the kitchen to produce a meal." What some call "foodhacking" is actually at least as old as Escoffier's 1903 Le Guide Culinaire. The science has always been there (and, Potter notes, cooking itself is engineering); it's our understanding of the sci- ence, and the accompanying technology, that continues to improve. But it takes a certain hacker (or Mt. Everest climber) mindset to experi- ment around the kitchen counter simply because you can. "There's this whole Mythbusters extreme style, where one starts with the reasonable, and then takes it as far as possible, just to see what would happen," says 24 SXSW ORLD / F EBRUAR Y 2010 " The set of skills that a geek uses in front of a keyboard is the same set of skills that a geek can use in the kitchen to produce a meal." will be extremely cold right after you make it – something Potter learned the hard way when the producer of a TV show that he guested on cemented her tongue to the concoction. At SXSW Interactive, Potter will fess up to some other mishaps while highlighting the basics of his book, including such topics as time and temperature ("the two key variables in cooking"), air ("which is effectively the key variable on baking"), hardware (from cast iron to sous vide), chemicals (both the everyday, like salt, and the more fanciful additives used to cook in the style of molecular gas- tronomy) and smell (do you know what happens if pinch your nose and taste- test cinnamon and cayenne pepper? Go to the panel and find out). You'll also get some practical advice. "One of the things that really brought 140, most of the myocin denatures, but if you cook it above 155, the actin denatures and it becomes tough. Hit it in between the two and you get medium rare—a piece of meat that looks good and tastes really good." And that's what matters most of all. "It's great to go into the kitchen me great joy while working on the book was understanding, from a texture and taste point of view, why red meat should be cooked to at least 140 degrees," says Potter. "There are two different proteins: myocin, and actin. Meats that have the myocin denatured taste better. Meats that have actin denatured are tough and chewy. So if you're cooking meat above and spend a very long time trying to get a perfect exact something," says Potter. "But on a day-to-day basis, there can be a trade-off between good enough and perfect. I personally fall more on the 'good enough' side. It's just nice to eat things that are yummy, and that you have fun making for friends." n Jeff Potter will present "Cooking for Geeks: A Primer on Food Hacking" on Friday, March 12. © 2010 JEFF POTTER, WWW.COOKINGFORGEEKS.COM

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