Nik Sharma: If You Understood What Was Happening in Your Kitchen, You'd Cook Completely Differently

Food with Mark Bittman

In this episode, Mark and Kate Bittman interview Nik Sharma, a former molecular biologist turned chef, about applying scientific principles to everyday

Key takeaways

• Adding a small amount of baking soda and water to ground meat can help it retain moisture and create a 'bouncy' texture in burgers and meatballs.
• Using baking soda to caramelize onions is discouraged because it turns them an unappetizing green and creates a mushy texture due to pectin breakdown.

Main topics

• Molecular biology in cooking
• The science of baking soda

Notable quotes

Soil is the baby crop.

Conclusion

The episode demonstrates that scientific literacy in the kitchen empow

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:02) I'm Mark Bittman, co-host of this podcast, along with my daughter, Kate. Speaker 3 (0:07) I'm Kate Bittman, and our podcast is about food, but really it's about everything else you can think of, too, because that's the way our conversations go. If Speaker 2 (0:16) you like what you hear here, you should also check us out online. We've got a great newsletter that touches on many of the things we talk about here. Plus, we've got lots of recipes. Find us at The Bittman Project on Substack or BittmanProject.com. Speaker 2 (0:50) I like Climate Week. Actually, I like many things this week. Wow, Speaker 3 (0:54) you like Climate Week. Tell me. Speaker 2 (0:56) I Speaker 3 (0:56) like Climate Speaker 2 (0:57) Week because I like that people are actually talking about it. And it's turned into, as I said of this thing last night, it's turned into Climate and Food Week. Although I say I like Climate Week, I hardly go to any of it. You should understand that I hardly go to any of these events. But I've gone to a couple. I'm going to a couple more. I just like it. It's also the UN General Assembly, so the city is like an absolute madhouse, and there's something quite exciting and fun about it when it's like this. It's just, I like that people are talking about climate and food seriously. Now, I will counter this argument in a minute when you ask me what I don't like, but I do like that it's happening. Speaker 3 (1:40) Looking forward to that, I'll tell you what I liked, which was the event that you did last night with... Sonia Gafsy-Oblisk, who is the chief merchandising and marketing officer of Whole Foods, who is fantastic. Oh my gosh, I loved her. She is just so much fun to talk to. And she has a very interesting job and a very interesting job history. But my favorite part, I guess, so she was interviewing you as a live podcast recording for the Whole Foods Beyond the Board podcast. And first of all, you were just fantastic. And I never get tired of hearing you talk. And you're so smart and you're so interesting. And I feel like the whole room was just really engaged. But there was one question and Brita Lundberg, who is of the Lundberg family, Lundberg Rice, and has become a friend. She and I just looked at each other like, oh, my God, that was. the best answer ever. Sonia asked you to try and simplify the meaning of regenerative agriculture because so many people, myself included, still have a hard time figuring out what exactly that means. And you said you made all of these sort of comparisons to sort of how it's a lot like organic and... We're going through a similar trajectory with regenerative now as we did with organic in the past. But you said, I just love it so much. You said that the way to think about or a good way to think about regenerative agriculture is to think about soil as the first crop. And Rita and I just looked at each other and we were like, oh, my God, soil is the baby crop. That makes so much sense. Speaker 2 (3:35) Well, yeah. Yeah. A couple things about that. Three things, maybe. Four things about that. One is regenerative agriculture. It's not a great term. Organic has become not a great term. The best term is agroecology, but everybody hates the word. So, you know, it's hard. It's hard to sum up what good agriculture is in one word. But people keep trying to do it. So that's... Sort of a trick. The soil health thing. I think that's right. I mean, if you want to do good agriculture, you don't have a lot of control over the sun. I mean, you have zero control over the sun. You don't have a lot of control over water. You have a little control over water, but you do have a fair amount of input into what happens with soil. And it's really important. And the way soil stays healthy is by being fed. And that's kind of what. regenerative agriculture is about, about feeding soil. So yeah, I think that's right. And I think points three and four are that hanging out with Gavley and Finley means you talk about that stuff a lot. And I've also spent 10, 15 years being friends with Ricardo Salvador, who's probably the smartest agronomist in the country. And I think he'd agree with that statement. So it's not like I figured this out myself, but anyway, yeah. Thank you. That was nice. Also, Whole Foods had some heavy freaking hitters there last night. They Speaker 3 (5:05) did. Speaker 2 (5:05) Like, practically their executive board was there. It was insane. Speaker 3 (5:11) Oh, really? Speaker 2 (5:12) I mean, Sonia, Stephanie, that guy Dan. Speaker 3 (5:18) I mean, someone Speaker 2 (5:19) else got pointed out to me. I never met her. I was like, are you going to talk to her? Anyway, it was fun. Speaker 3 (5:25) Great. Well, I hope I was well-behaved because who knows? They Speaker 2 (5:29) all love you. Terry Lai loves you. Speaker 3 (5:31) Yeah, I'm just a fucking delight. Speaker 3 (5:40) So it's hard to believe that we haven't had Nick Sharma on until now. Speaker 2 (5:45) Yeah, I know. He's a former molecular biologist turned three-time James Beard finalist who just wants people to, like, cook and eat delicious food while they understand how they made it in the first place so they can and will want to make it again. So he's got, like, a deeper understanding of this stuff than certainly I do. Speaker 3 (6:06) Yeah, I feel like that was fun. It was fun for you. in particular, to talk to him because you've been cooking for so long without having like a full understanding of how your things are getting cooked, like how scientifically they're cooking. And I mean, obviously me too, but you've been cooking for a lot longer than me. So his new book is Fundamentals of Flavor, and its goal is to show how the science behind everyday cooking techniques like roasting, baking, boiling, etc. helps you put good meals on the table. There's an entire section on baking soda alone that's crazy interesting. And the next time I make meatballs, thanks to Nick, I'll be adding baking soda to them, which you will understand why after you listen to this interview. Nick is also an editor-in-residence at America's Test Kitchen, formerly Cooks Illustrated, formerly Cooks, right? Which I believe you were one of the first editors at. So if I'm... Correct here. This is like a real full circle moment. Speaker 2 (7:08) It's a little more complicated than that. The original Cooks, which I was the editor of, went out of business. And then Chris Gimbel launched Cooks Illustrated. And I was the editor of that. And then left. And then it became America's Test Kitchen. Chris left at some point also. So, but yeah, there's definitely a relationship there. Love that. Speaker 3 (7:30) All right. Well, here we go. Here Speaker 2 (7:31) we go. Speaker 3 (7:32) Let's talk to Nick. Speaker 2 (7:33) Very happy to have you here. Thank you for joining us. Likewise. Speaker 3 (7:37) Yay, we're so happy to have you. I Speaker 2 (7:40) want to ask you this. If I understood what was happening when I was cooking, would I cook differently? Like, you know, I don't, I understand like a very, I know what rehydrating is. But if I understand what was happening when I Speaker 1 (7:57) was browning something, would it help me? That's a really good question. I'm going to say yes, because when I did things without because OK, so I grew up in a household where my mother hates cooking. She loads even walking into my kitchen when she visits and she'll look at me and she'll say, you really enjoy doing this with. I feel like there's such disappointment in a voice even after all these years. That's great. Having learned from her how to cook, and she's a good cook. The four things she makes, she makes them really well, but there's just no, like, love to do it. But I think had she told me, this is why you do something, and then I move away from home and living by myself, and I mess it up, and there's no one to tell me what I did wrong or how to go about it, or maybe I could have done that maybe in five minutes instead of 30 minutes. It would have, I don't know, like made my life better in general. I don't think like it would have helped me conquer Mount Everest climbing that, right? But it would have given me, I don't know, like more confidence. And I feel that's something that with the kitchen, as we get more reliant on appliances and all these other tools, what is missing I notice now from a lot of home cooks or people who start learning how to cook for the first time is confidence. And I didn't have that then. And I wish someone had told me, hey, you can caramelize things or cook things faster if you just did this. This one little thing would have dramatically changed everything for you. Speaker 2 (9:36) But in a way, that's my job is to teach people how to cook. But your job is to sort of help people understand what's actually going on while they're cooking. Like on a molecular level. And I'm asking. Would I benefit from understanding what happens on a molecular level? I'm not being challenging or sarcastic. Speaker 1 (9:58) I'm genuinely, genuinely curious. It's a question that comes up often because there is a part of me that wants to dive deep into the science of why things are moving as molecules and why they're meeting and why that's relevant. But at the same time, I come back to the home cook's perspective of, will... For a long time, like we're talking about caramelizing onions. So for a long time, I think you remember this. People were saying add baking soda to onions and it'll help caramelize it faster. And I thought, oh, you know, like logically that makes sense because of all the things baking soda does to this particular structural carbohydrate in onions. When I actually went to do it. It gave me a completely different perspective of why I should never do this again in my life. I Speaker 3 (10:45) started Speaker 1 (10:46) with red onions. They turned, because red onions have anthocyanins, baking soda is alkaline, it made everything a really ugly green. And I said, this makes sense to me as a scientist, but as a home cook, I would be so disgusted with this. Unless this was serving some ulterior purpose, right? And then the other thing I realized, the effect of baking soda was so dramatic that it made everything into mush. And there was a lot of water in there. So the caramelization process, which is the whole idea of like shortening this cooking time, wasn't happening. Water was keeping the temperature down. So it was never getting to the point where it caramelized. And so I said, oh my gosh, like this logically makes sense. But I don't know if anyone's actually tried this. All the people who are vouching for this. But this is what I'm seeing in my home kitchen. I'm not working in a lab anymore, but this is literally what I'm seeing in a saucepan. So for me to like, then to say, I think science is really important because you can tell people why things work, but also why they don't work. And the negative is also important. So knowing why what baking soda is doing to pectin in that sense for caramelization of onions made me realize this is not a hack that I should be advocating for. The easier thing and the simplest thing to do is just take the onions, put it on a baking sheet, put it in the oven in a flat layer with a tiny pinch of salt and some oil, and you'll get nice crispy onions if that's your goal. If you want jammy caramelized onions, you need to lock in some of the water. So then do it in a saucepan. But for heaven's sake, just don't use baking soda. Wow. Speaker 3 (12:21) So the answer is yes. If we were scientists, we would absolutely be better cooks. Yeah. Speaker 1 (12:27) And I Speaker 3 (12:28) never thought about like, The fact that the things that would gross us out... Well, I don't know that my dad gets grossed out by much, but... Speaker 2 (12:37) Green onions. Red Speaker 3 (12:40) onions turning Speaker 2 (12:41) green might do it. Speaker 3 (12:43) Really? Speaker 2 (12:44) Well, I mean, it sounds fun, but it doesn't sound appetizing. Speaker 3 (12:48) But the things that would gross us out wouldn't gross you out because you would understand them so much better. We had... This young baker Justin Allen on the podcast and he was telling us about how he I don't know what it was cupcakes or something and he kept Speaker 2 (13:05) making Speaker 3 (13:06) them and every time he made