The Cooking Time Edition

Matt Locke (ML) is a WITI reader and the Director of Storythings, a content agency based in the UK. He previously wrote the Andy Warhol Album Covers Edition and the TV Schedule Edition.

Matt here. It’s been a very cold January here in the UK, something that compels me to make stews and casseroles, dishes that get their rich flavor and depth thanks to one of the most important ingredients in cooking: Time. Working in restaurants in my youth, one thing I learned was that understanding time is the key to truly excellent cooking, whether you’re turning out one, two, or dozens of complex dishes a night.

Why is this interesting?

Most cooks only think about time when browsing the intro to a recipe, or setting a timer for the oven. But understanding time as an ingredient in itself is a bit like learning scales on a musical instrument—it helps you move from the simple copying of an amateur to the improvisation of a master. If you want to start exploring just how significantly time affects your cooking, the best place to witness the changes is with the backbone of nearly all savory dishes - sauces and stocks.

Just as there is a logic to the repeating scales on a keyboard or fretboard, there is a logic to the role that time plays in sauces - you could call it the sauce/time continuum. As the minutes go up, the interaction of heat, liquids, and ingredients creates different flavor profiles and textures. Here’s how much time you’ll want to allow for achieving maximum flavor across a variety of different dishes:

Under 30 minutes
To start, we have a variety of what we could call pan sauces. These use the initial breakdown of ingredients in a hot stove-top pan to create a simple emulsion - often with wine, vinegar, or water - that adds flavor to the final dish. Stir frys are at the quickest end of this stage, followed by the deglazed sauces created by adding liquid to the pan after searing meat or fish, and dishes like Cacio e Pepe that use starchy pasta water as the basis of a fast sauce. The aim here is to quickly capture the flavor created by the caramelization of sugars in the foods within a liquid suspension; then adding herbs or a sour ingredient to interact with the sugars. Liquids play an important role in carrying flavor—they extend their reach and impact in our mouths, covering more of our taste buds, which is why sauces are so important to good cooking.

30 minutes to one hour
Up to an hour is the braising zone, where we are cooking ingredients immersed in liquids to retard some of the caramelization and capture the flavor in the liquid instead. When cooking vegetables, most of the flavor will be captured in this zone, and further cooking will only turn the ingredients to mush without releasing any additional flavor. A lot of tomato-based pasta sauces fit into this category, along with vegetable stocks and casseroles.

One hour to 8 hours
We’re now entering the meat and fish stock zone. The extended cooking time allows collagen in meat and bones to convert to gelatin, an excellent suspension material for other flavors. This long, slow cooking is how we make meat or fish stocks as bases for other sauces. In restaurant kitchens, these stocks are batch-made days in advance, so they can be added when needed to other sauces in the heat of a busy restaurant setting. Making a good stock is kind of like preserving time. When we add it to a sauce we release that time, and the flavors it developed, back into the present.

Two of the five classic ‘mother sauces’ of French cooking—the velouté and espagnole—are based on pre-made base stocks. If you’ve ever bought a very high-end cookbook, you’ll see recipes that refer back to other recipes for these basic sauces. (I once attempted a Marco Pierre White recipe with a sauce that referred you back to a veloute recipe that in turn referred you back to a veal stock recipe, a Russian doll of a dish that took me most of the weekend to cook.)

Complex, multilayered sauces like this are at the heart of French cooking, bringing deep complexity to pan-fried meat or fish dishes. Purely vegetable-based sauces get no real benefit from this length of cooking. It’s the rich collagen of animal bones that needs this amount of time to unlock. 

8 hours and beyond
Like the space/time continuum, the sauce/time continuum gets weird in its extremes. For pretty much all of us cooks, spending more than a day cooking something isn’t going to be worth your time or effort. But if you do, cooking can turn from creating a meal to creating something even deeper: history and community.

This is the zone of master stocks or ‘perpetual stews’—sauces that have been cooking for days, months, or even years. In these dishes, the stockpot is never emptied, but continually replenished and kept simmering, often adding or changing ingredients over time. This is the free jazz zone of using time as an ingredient: There is no real evidence that extreme times add more flavor to a dish, but by pushing the edges of the sauce/time continuum, something more important than flavor is unleashed.

Quick Links

• The ever-reliable J. Kenji Lopéz-Alt ran a great experiment with time and cooking, testing a meat stock made three ways; In a traditional stockpot, a pressure cooker, and a slow cooker. His write-up is a great further introduction to understanding how time and temperature affect your cooking.

• The Japanese dish Oden serves ingredients that are stewed in a long-simmering broth. At the Tokyo restaurant Otafuku, the broth has been simmering since 1945. It would be older if a World War Two bomb hadn’t destroyed the restaurant and its broth that year.

• In summer 2023, a perpetual stew made in a crockpot in Bushwick became a minor social media star, running eventually for 60 days. That’s nothing compared to the cassoulet served at Le Central in San Francisco, which has, at the time of writing, been cooking for 17,698 days.

Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Matt (ML) 

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