Eat Hard – Live Hard

The Food Scientist: Kenji Lopez-alt is here to make you better at eating

Mon, 14 Nov 2016 14:42:19 +0000

J. Kenji Lopez-alt has changed the way I cook. Seriously. Since I got his cookbook about a year ago (fun story: I walked into a sushi place with it the day it launched, and the lady behind the counter gave me a discount in exchange for a flick through the recipe section), I’ve rethought my approach to burgers, saved a cumulative twenty-odd hours of life making chicken and ended a decade-long anxiety about the best way to make Yorkshire puddings. I’ve learned why sausages sometimes go so dreadfully wrong, and how to make them perfectly every time. And, more than anything else, I have learned a way to make cauliflower that I will eat like French Fries. If cooking well is foundational to a healthy life (and I think it is), then Kenji Lopez-alt is the best fitness expert you’ve never heard of.

How can one chef be such a game-changer? Simple: Lopez thinks of food like a scientist. Firstly, he explains what’s going on when you cook in science-terms (best example: brussels sprouts taste bad because overcooking them breaks down sulphurous compounds called glucosinolates in them, while destroying the sharper tasting compounds that you want: so the goal in cooking them is to get them hot as fast as possible). Secondly, and maybe more importantly, he experiments on food, using controls and quantifiable results, like an actual scientist. In his seminal Yorkshire pudding experiments, for instance, he tries all the myths about good Yorkshires (hot pan, cold batter, rest the mix overnight, add a splash of water), makes about forty batches of puddings, and sees what works. Result: I don’t have to do the work, and I can make my Yorkshires happy that, for once, I’m doing it right. Take the guesswork out of cooking, and (for me, at least) it’s a lot more fun.

So: I decided to ask Kenji about some stuff. Specifically, I wanted to get his thoughts on starting the process of cookery, because I know it’s something that took me years of adult life to get into. And because he’s a lovely, sharing chap (check out his Reddit profile for more info than I can fit in here), he was happy to share. Here’s what we talked about.

Obviously, not all Food Lab stuff is explicitly health-focused. How much is nutrition a concern when you’re coming up with recipes? Do you have any general rules of thumb when it comes to eating ‘healthy’?

It’s not really a primary concern of mine. I find by cooking a variety of foods and focusing on vegetables, the nutrition mostly takes care of itself (and my doctor/tests tends to agree). My overall eating philosophy is this: we all know what crap is, just don’t eat a lot of it. I keep my diet varied, I eat a lot of vegetables, and I only order a small popcorn when I go to the movies. Regular exercise, eating a varied diet, and stopping before you’re completely stuffed is a diet that works whether you’re a vegan or an omnivore. The other important thing is not to deprive yourself of the occasional indulgence. That only makes you resent food, when it should be something to celebrate.

What’s the one thing most people do when they’re trying to teach themselves to cook that you think is kind of a waste of time?

As long as you’re cooking you’re not wasting time, but I do think people tend to focus too much on recipes instead of seeing through the recipes to the techniques behind them. Understanding technique is what frees you in the kitchen and allows you to develop your own recipes.

What do most people neglect that you think they should do?

Start with the basics. Get a good knife and learn to use it properly. Knife skills are the foundation of all good cooking, especially when it comes to vegetables!

If someone was going to spend, say, a month teaching themselves to cook from scratch (or near as damnit), what would you tell them to focus on? And if they were going to drop $100 on gear, what would you tell them to buy?

I would spend $50 on a Tojiro Pro knife, $20 on a large cutting board, and $30 on a decent stainless steel pot big enough to cook soups, boil beans, blanch vegetables, etc. Don’t focus on trying to recreate a restaurant meal or on something that you’ll only use to try and impress friends at dinner parties. Focus on the staples that will feed you and your loved ones every day, whether that’s learning how to make a good vinaigrette so your salads become a meal, how to properly boil or scramble eggs, or how to cook a pot of beans to that perfect creamy consistency.

What resources would you suggest they use (apart from the Food Lab, obviously)?

America’s Test Kitchen does a great job of explaining the basics. I really enjoy Jacques Pépin’s work as well. [ed note: you should absolutely check out Jacques’ five-minute omelette tutorial, as seen here]

Totally unrelated to cookery: what else in your life do you always make time for? What makes you happy?

Hanging out with my wife and dogs, playing music and singing, woodworking and remodeling our house, playing video games and going to the movies, and doing any kind of adventurous outdoor activity (the more travel the better!) are all on my list of favourite things to do.

Short but sweet. Get after it.

HOMEWORK: Head to Serious Eats and have a read through Kenji’s work. And cook something new this week.

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How I actually make good food choices

Tue, 20 Sep 2016 09:24:44 +0000

I like to think I generally eat pretty well. If we’re grading on ‘Good for your life goals’, where Team Sky’s micro-orchestrated protein-and-carb consumption is a 10, and crisp sandwiches for a breakfast every day is a zero, I’m probably about a 7: pretty good, occasional slip-ups. I eat a hell lot of greens, get protein at every meal, cook close to 100 percent of everything I eat at home from scratch, and only occasionally go crazy and inhale an entire packet of Jammie Dodgers.

Yeah.

The thing is: I have some willpower, but not lots – and what I do have, I like to use on other things, like work, Brazilian jiu-jitsu and pull-ups. Also, I love shitty food: maybe it’s because I’m from the North of England, maybe it’s because my workmates used to placate me with biscuits, or maybe it’s just because sugar is delicious. So eating ‘right’ – in a way that fits my goals in life – doesn’t always come easy. Fortunately, I have read, tried, and adopted or discarded every ‘How to eat better’ tip you’ve ever seen, and about three times as many that you haven’t. Here’s what actually works for me:

1. Not now, but soon

This four-word phrase is more likely to stop me making bad food decision than any other: including ‘Think of the trans-fats!’ and ‘Wait, that doughnut’s poisoned.’ I (like you, probably) don’t respond well to the word ‘Never’ – but putting things off? I can do that for a long time. When I fancy a pizza, I tell myself ‘Have it on Friday, when it’s the end of the week and well-deserved.’ When I really want a Twinkie: ‘Save it for after the Big Project’s done.’ The trick? When these times come, Twinkies and pizza are usually inaccessible or unappealing. You don’t have to swear off the food forever: you just need to tell yourself ‘You can have one soon, big guy’, and get out of the danger zone.

2. Not keeping bad stuff in the house

If there is bread in the house, I will eat it. If there are biscuits in the office, I will eat all the biscuits. This is fine, because I’m also quite lazy: usually, just not having the bad things to hand is enough to stop me going out and getting any. My rule of thumb: accept that buying a packet of treats means eating all the treats, and do it very, very rarely.

3. ‘I’m not eating/drinking [X] right now’

This is how I deal with well-intentioned friends/family/colleagues trying to give me biscuits/beer/whatever else. Crucially, not ‘I can’t’ or ‘I shouldn’t’ (which imply that you’re sad about the situation) or ‘I’m trying not to’ (which reframes the whole process as a struggle in your own traitorous brain), but ‘I’m not.’ This stops most negotiation or temptation or ‘Go on, just one…’ manoeuvres dead – but more importantly, removes the willpower thing entirely. For extreme cases – sugary pop, say – ‘I don’t eat [X]’ is also acceptable.

4. ‘Mental note: [X] makes you feel like shit’

Here’s a fun fact: I regularly ate Krispy Kremes for much longer than I should have, just because they kept tricking me with their nice colours and front-of-shop placement. Every time I actually ate one, I’d remember that a) They weren’t all that great and b) They made me feel terrible afterwards. This lasted all the way up until my wife went ‘Wait, don’t you hate Krispy Kremes?’ as I lunged for an Original Glazed, and I’ve never eaten a Krispy Kreme since. Here’s the trick: when you eat something and feel like crap afterwards, note that feeling. Internalise it. Next time you want the thing: remember it.

HOMEWORK: Eat something that’s terrible for you this week. Note how it makes you feel, and then don’t eat it again.

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The Homer Simpson Diet: or, why you should eat more like America’s most comically obese man

Mon, 12 Jan 2015 11:00:00 +0000

Cheat day.

Homer Simpson is the Platonic ideal of American obesity. He drinks like a sailor, eats enough donuts to give Satan himself pause, and once ingested a handful of Play-Doh to nudge himself onto disability benefit. But, astonishingly, some of his dietary habits are sound – even if they’re outweighed by all the other terrible ones. Here’s how you can eat more like a man who once failed to fit into a voting booth – and get healthier.

Mmmm…buttered coffee

If you remember the episode where Homer discovers the gym and climbs the Murderhorn, you may also remember that he’s nudged into it by failing horribly during a gentle game of capture the flag – cue lamentations about how much he’s let himself go. Marge’s response? ‘I’m not the one who puts butter in your coffee.’

‘But Dave Asprey told me to.’

Ha, right? What kind of glutton does that? Well, as you may already be aware, buttered coffee is the hot new thing among fitness professionals and self-experimenting body-hackers, who claim that – as a breakfast – it can keep you sated for hours, give you unprecedented levels of mental energy, and ‘programme’ your body to burn fat as its primary energy source. It’s all down to the fact that grass-fed butter – probably not the kind Homer uses – is a good source of healthy fat, and has the right ratios of omega-3 fatty acids (good) to omega-6 (generally speaking, bad). This guy has built his own coffee brand off the back off it, after first trying it with Tibetan yak butter – it’s popular with sherpas, apparently. If you fancy giving it a try, make yourself a half-litre of coffee and mix in around two tablespoons of butter (more is possible, but see whether you like the taste first). You could also try coconut oil – some nutritionists even recommend egg yolks, though there are obvious salmonella-based drawbacks to that. The real takeaway is that fat is not to be feared, and it’s a message that’s finally percolating through to mainstream society – even Time magazine recently ran a piece on it. Butter, certainly, is preferable to margarine and other substitutes, since it’s less full of horrendous additives and preservatives. Remember, though – ideally, this is a substitute for breakfast, not something to eat alongside a huge plate of bacon. Although that brings us to…

Mmmm…bacon-sausage

‘Bacon up that sausage, boy.’ It’s the sort of parental command that would have childhood-obesity campaigners up in arms, especially after (as in the episode) Bart’s already buttered up his bacon. Won’t somebody think of the trans-fats?

Top Banting.

Well, except that this is exactly the sort of meal that Gary Taubes, respected obesity authority and bestselling author of Good Calories, Bad Calories (and its easier-to-digest sequel, Why We Get Fat) recommends, and personally eats, on a near-daily basis. Taubes’ argument, in brief, is that eating carbohydrates (especially refined carbohydrates, like you get in bread and pasta), drives the body to release insulin, which can lead to insulin resistance and, eventually, diabetes. It’ll also, he argues, lead to your body storing excess carbohydrates in fat cells, for energy. His solution? Cut the carbohydrates, forcing your body to enter a state known as ketosis, where it’ll burn fatty triglycerides for energy instead. According to Taubes: “I eat eggs and bacon or sausage for breakfast every day. At lunch, I might have three quarters of a pound of hamburger with cheese, no bun. Dinner is a pound of steak or half a roast chicken or the largest piece of fish I can buy,
and vegetables. You eat what you want until you’re satiated—you just don’t eat the things that will make you fat.’

Sounds good? You don’t have to go that far, but the message is clear: fat isn’t the problem – sugar and refined carbs are. Oh, and another caveat: you should probably be eating decent-quality sausage and bacon to avoid the nasty processed additives used to bulk out or preserve the budget versions.’

Mmmm…Guatemalan Insanity pepper

Even if they existed, it would probably not be a good idea to eat the the Merciless Peppers of Quetzalacatenango – grown, according to Chief Wiggum, ‘Deep in the jungle primeval by the inmates of a Guatemalan insane asylum.’ But generally, Marge’s attempts to steer Homer away from the annual Chili Cook-Off are as misguided as they are doomed: since it’s actually possible that the big man’s love of all things spicy is one of the only things keeping him alive.

‘I know I look evil, but it’s actually full of capsaicin.’

Sad fact: when many people decide to eat more healthily, they seem to do it based on some half-remembered version of what bodybuilders ate in the 1980s – endless dry chicken breasts and broccoli, unseasoned and scooped grudgingly from tupperware tubs. This is ridiculous for many reasons, but here’s the key one: herbs and spices not only make things delicious, they make you healthier. Cumin, for instance, aids memory and metabolism and lowers stress, cinnamon lowers blood sugar, turmeric improves liver function and heart health and protects against everything from Alzheimer’s to leukemia, and capsaicin, which is what makes peppers spicy, improves mood, reduces pain, reduces inflammation, burns fat, and has cancer-fighting properties. Obviously the fresher the better, but the message is simple: use spices when you cook. Not only do they make your food taste like actual, you know, food, but they’ll make you healthier in almost every way. They won’t let you hallucinate a coyote version of Johnny Cash, but it’s tough to say whether that’d be beneficial anyway.

Mmmm…free-range lobster

When Homer acquires a lobster (called Pinchy), there’s only one clear endgame in sight: and sure enough, after all sorts of adventures and Marge-baiting hijinks, Pinchy goes for a bath. A hot bath. Commendably, though, Homer does not waste food, even if it was once a loyal pet. ‘Man that’s good,’ he notes, between grief-wracked sobs. ‘Pass the butter.’

Delicious.

Should you eat more lobster? Debatable. The real lesson here, though, is that hand-reared, carefully-raised produce doesn’t just taste better – it’s also better for you. To quote Paleo Solution author Robb Wolf: ‘One of the greatest deviations away from our ancestral diet is the amounts and types of fat found in modern grain feed animals vs. the amounts and types of fats found in grass fed or wild meat, fowl and fish. What we observe is wild meat is remarkably lean, and has relatively low amounts of saturated fats, while supplying significant amounts of beneficial omega-3 fats such as EPA and DHA.’ To caveat this a bit, eating a free-range, grass-fed cow isn’t exaclty ‘wild’ meat, but it’s certainly better for you than eating the factory-farmed, stress-hormone-filled, horror-filled alternative. The take-home message? If you could nurture all your food in a loving environment – and then kill it and it eat – you’d probably be much healthier than you are. Since that probably isn’t an option, stick to free-range and grass-fed.

So, in conclusion, here’s what you can learn from the Homer Simpson Diet:

Switch margarine for butter – and don’t be afraid to eat good sources of fat.
Eat high-quality meat and cut down on refined carbs.
Cook with spices as much as you can.
Go free-range wherever possible.

Oh, and don’t eat any of the following: three-week old sandwiches, compressed spaghetti bars, all the doughnuts in the world or a tiny bicycle. There are limits, after all.

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Ask Live Hard: getting ripped and cooking shirtless

Thu, 13 Nov 2014 10:42:39 +0000

here or here]

I love cycling, as it gets my arms and legs toned while I enjoy myself and get fit and go places. But it does nothing for my core, which is all flabby and still has the remnants of manboobs from when I used to drink shitloads as a coping mechanism.

Is there an activity that will exercise and tone my core as a sort of fortunate side effect, in a similar way to how bracing while cycling up endless hills has finally given me buff arms? I know you’re going to say “swimming” but I hate it and don’t want to have to get naked.

Jonas, via email

I’ve got good news, Jonas: there are several things I’d recommend, and none of them involves being even semi-naked – unless you want to start cooking your bacon without a shirt on, which I find adds a dangerous frisson that’s often missing from breakfast time. They are, in no particular order:

Shopping
Cooking
Sleeping
Playing with dogs

To explain: if you already do a fair amount of exercise, more exercise is probably not what you need to shed bodyfat. What you actually need is to invest more time and energy in cooking and eating better, so that you aren’t at the mercy of ready-meals that are packed with sugar, refined carbs, trans fats and other nasty crap. Keep cycling: but instead of working out, resolve to spend 30 minutes a week loading up on meat, veg and fruit – and another hour or so cooking it all into protein and veg-heavy meals.

Done that? Okay, part two: stored bodyfat around the abdomen is often a symptom that you’re awash with the stress hormone cortisol, which means that you could use more, better sleep, and less stress in your life. There are lots of ways to do this, some of which I’ve detailed here. But it’s also worth noting that just calming down can sometimes get you in better shape. There’s a reason I’ve got a six-pack in many of my holiday photos, and it’s not that I stick to some sort of insane diet when there are caipirinhas to drink at 11am and all-you-can-eat steak restaurants to bankrupt – it’s that I calm down, my stress hormones level off, and my body stops storing fat as if it’s expecting an apocalyptic meltdown. No holidays planned? Hug your girlfriend. Pat a dog. Go for a walk. Remember that in ten years you’ll barely remember what’s stressing you out today, and that in a hundred years you’ll be dust. And watch the bodyfat drop off.

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