A no-nonsense, fairly silly, guide to cooking during the apocalypse.
This guide will teach you how to cook, how to make your own recipes, basic fundamentals of cuisine, why brown is the tastiest color, how to prevent your pee from attracting maraud...
Fire — nature's microwave. It has been a source of warmth, light, and ways to scare off Frankenstein's monsters since time immemorial. Humanity wouldn't be where it is without it, which, given how the world is literally on fire right now, might've not been the best move.
But there is perhaps no greater contribution to fire than making our food delicious. Be it by heating a pot of water or by charring some veggies to turning steaks from red weird things to brown goodness. Fire is synonymous with cooking. Everything fire touches becomes instantly, 100% better.
Which is why people don't know how to use it.
You see, people think that more fire + more deliciousness, which is how you end you with a burnt cake.
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There is a reason why stoves don't come in only a switch between Off and Hotter Than The Sun In A Bikini. Temperature and time go hand in hand, which is difficult to do when you're nuking your food with everything you have. Foods have different thicknesses and compositions which require different types of cooking at different temperatures.
For a rare steak, you want less time and high temperature to make that brown crust appear, while something like a stew requires low temperature and more time to make the flavors integrate like an after-work mixer.
Since we have to make our ingredients last, as cow's stomachs are now well suited for radioactive grass and steaks are hard to come by, before trying to make anything, we first have to learn about how to make food, how to cook, and how heat works. Basically, today we will learn the basic principles of cooking so you don't go burning down the house.
1. Why do we even cook?
Cooking food has two basic objectives: to make food more bearable to our feeble human tummies, and to provide flavor and aroma. On many occasions cooks when cooking food achieve both goals at once, as heat breaks down molecules responsible for toughness, and in turn, chemical reactions are triggered that form aromatic compounds. The smell-good molecules.
Heat increases the mobility of atoms and molecules, and as such, increases their energy, making them transform and react. Basically, we transform food. Did you know that alchemy was born in the kitchen? In that way, we are all apocalyptic alchemists. Add that to your list of titles. Lord/Lady [INSERT YOUR NAME HERE], Spice Emperor, Apocalyptic Alchemist.
The molecules collide with each other, they deform, and when like-minded groups meet, new interactions occur between them giving rise to new compounds. Kinda like a molecule fanclub creating new O.Cs.
Another object of cooking is the elimination of microorganisms, which we already talked about.
2. How do I harness the ancient power of fire to strike fear in the heart of my enemies? And also to cook my food, I guess.
