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Adam Liaw Profile picture
@adamliaw
Sep 28, 2020 • 9 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X
I'm writing an article on how to cook things that people think are hard to master. What's something you can never seem to cook just right?
OK, it seems you all got very excited so I'm going to do some quick replies to these suggestions in this thread 👇
The problem with almost every bad scone is that the dough has been overworked. It should be barely coming together. Just stir it a couple of times and DON'T knead it.
Lots of salt on the skin. Refrigerate overnight. Cook it at roasting temperature first to soften the skin, then crisp the crackling with the grill later (not the other way around).
Stirring risotto is overrated. The thing that makes it creamy is beating in enough fat to coat the starch in the form of cheese or butter at the end. If your risotto isn't creamy you need to add more butter/cheese.
Overworked batter. Make the batter in a blender (the blades cut the gluten strands,) or make the batter the night before to rest and relax the gluten, and you'll have fluffy pancakes every time.
The one step almost every curry recipe outside the Indian subcontinent misses is tadka/tempering/chaunk.
Combine the sauce with the pasta in a frying pan and cook it together to bring them together instead of just dumping the sauce on top. It's what every restaurant does.
Prick a hole in the base of the egg before boiling. Transfer the egg to iced water after boiling.

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More from @adamliaw

Adam Liaw Profile picture
Nov 27, 2022
The absolute easiest thing most people could do to immediately improve the taste of their cooking is start using MSG. No kidding.

It should be as basic to seasoning as salt or sugar, and that most of us don't use it based on old, debunked misinformation is quite ridiculous.
We season food to our five tastes and keep basic seasonings to achieve that efficiently. Most kitchens will use:

Salt - salt
Sweet - sugar
Sour - vinegar
Bitter - pepper
Umami - stock, soybean/seafood sauces, MSG
(Note: while we can say pepper is a bitter seasoning, we primarily use it for a sensation called "chemical irritation" like chilli, which is not technically a taste.)
Read 9 tweets
Adam Liaw Profile picture
May 12, 2022
Win or lose, this #auspol election is an existential threat to the Liberal party. The political calculus of sacrificing moderates to teals might seems like a handful of seats that they hope to win back with conservative candidates elsewhere, but it’s much more than that.
The Liberals have already lost one generation of moderates in the era of Turnbull, Bishop, Pyne etc.

Add to that the likes of Berejiklian, Banks and soon possibly Zimmerman, Wilson, Sharma and even Frydenberg and what’s left?
The right will welcome that shift, but centrist LNP voters won’t stick by a coalition where the defining voices are the likes of Dutton, Morrison, Canavan and Joyce, or culture warriors like Hastie and Paterson. To imagine they will is dreamland stuff.
Read 9 tweets
Adam Liaw Profile picture
Jan 24, 2022
While perhaps a joke, this is 100% true.

Processed food's advantage over many home cooks is it uses MSG (or its differently labelled but chemically identical substitutes) to improve taste.

If home cooks seasoned with MSG (which is natural) they'd eat less processed food.
The biggest ploy, however, was once "MSG is bad" became an ingrained belief in the West (despite ample evidence to the contrary), "No added MSG" became a processed food marketing point.

There's still plenty of MSG in there, but it's just added under another name.
Hydrolyzed soy protein, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, yeast extract, vegetable extract, hydrolyzed whey protein etc., all contain MSG and are added for the same flavour enhancing purpose.

There's nothing wrong with them, except you can't buy them off the shelf like MSG.
Read 6 tweets
Adam Liaw Profile picture
Dec 6, 2021
Two things Chinese chefs do that can improve your cooking at home is (1) marinating meats with a pinch of bicarb before cooking, and (2) adding MSG to your food.

These are straight up game-changers and if French chefs did them we'd rightly call them geniuses.
The pinch of bicarb creates an alkaline environment that inhibits the tightening of muscle fibres, which gives you more tender meat or seafood. It's actually a very old technique known as velveting where meat and seafood are "washed" with running water before frying.
Most water sources are slightly alkaline. In ancient times this was because of spring water running through alkaline rocks, and in modern times tap water is kept alkaline to reduce corrosion.
Read 9 tweets
Adam Liaw Profile picture
Dec 6, 2021
Tonight’s dinner. Shared steak on mushroom sauce. Two things I always do when having steak:

1. Cook one good quality steak for the whole family, and
2. Serve it on top of the sauce.
On 1, we don’t need to eat 300g of meat each, so serving a whole steak per person seems like overkill. 80-100g of good quality steak is totally enough, tastes better and is better for your health and the environment.
And on 2, if you’re going to get a nice seared crust on the outside of a steak you don’t need to douse the whole thing in sauce. Having the sauce underneath catches the steaks juices and lets you decide how much sauce you want. 👍
Read 4 tweets
Adam Liaw Profile picture
Mar 4, 2021
The reason we get frustrated with the digital world is because EVERY product or service is a bait and switch. It's not news that Facebook is a data harvesting/sales operation masquerading as a way to connect with friends, but that applies to literally everything online.
A mobile game isn't a game. It's an advertising delivery platform. Your photo editing software isn't a way to edit photos, it's a subscription revenue platform. Your bikeshare app isn't a transport solution, it's a capital raising.
When the revenue stream for a business isn't aligned to the product, there is always going to be frustration because the design and delivery of the product is separate to the success of the business, which is dependent on revenue.
Read 10 tweets

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