Cooking for Geeks: an interview with Adam Savage

For my book, Cooking for Geeks (O'Reilly Media, 2010), I interviewed food scientists, researchers, and chefs; but one of my favorite interviews was the one I did with Adam Savage, co-host of Discovery Channel's MythBusters. And yes, Adam is just as much fun and as animated in real life as you'd suspect from watching the show.

Jeff: How do you go about testing a myth?

Adam: One of the earliest things we realized on the show is that you always have to have something to compare to. We would try to come up with an answer like: is this guy dead, is this car destroyed, is this an injury? And we would be trying to compare it to an absolute value, like X number of feet fallen equals dead. The problem is the world is very spongy and nonuniform, and trying to nail down a value like that can be really difficult. So we always end up doing relative tests. We end up doing a control under regular circumstances and then we test the myth under identical circumstances, and we compare the two things. In that comparison, we get to see our results.

We did one where we were testing whether or not you could tenderize steaks with explosives. We had to figure out what tenderness is. The problem is you can give two different people each a piece of steak from the same cut compared to a piece of steak from a different cut, and they might come up with two different assessments of which one is more tender. We actually did a whole day of testing that didn't end up on film because we realized we were using the wrong parameters for assessing steak tenderness. The USDA actually has a machine for testing the tenderness of steak that measures the pounds of force it takes to punch a hole through a steak. We replicated that machine and to our great surprise, it worked exactly as it was supposed to. Coming up with something for $50 that equals the USDA testing equipment: that was thrilling!

Jeff: How can testing a myth translate into learning more about cooking?

Adam: Changing one variable is probably the single hardest thing for people to understand. Change only one variable. It's not like changing only a small number of variables; it's really changing one variable at a time, because only then do you know what caused the change between your first test and your second test. You get so much clarity from the process that way.

I'm an avid cook. My wife and I both cook a lot of elaborate things, and we really do love playing around with single variables, changing things and learning how things work. We were reading Thomas Keller, and he talked about how salt is a flavor enhancer, and he mentioned that vinegar does a similar thing. It doesn't add a new taste, but it often alters the taste that's there. My wife was making a cauliflower soup, and it was kind of bland. I didn't want to put any more salt in it, because I could tell it was about to go in the wrong direction. We tossed in a little bit of vinegar and the whole thing just woke up. It was thrilling! I love that.

Jeff: Have you done other myths related to food?

Adam: We have --- certainly a whole bunch of drinking myths. We did poppy seed bagels to see if eating a poppy seed bagel causes you to test positive for heroin, which is absolutely true. In fact, parolees are completely forbidden from eating poppy seed bagels. They're told if you test positive for drugs, we are not going to wonder why. You are just going to go back to jail, so make it easy, don't eat poppy seeds.

I had a whole episode written called "The Surreal Gourmet," which ended with tenderizing steak with dynamite, but it had all those other things like poaching fish on your catalytic converter or cooking eggs in your dishwasher. Jamie loves the idea of tenderizing meat in the dryer.

Jeff: I thought of roasting almonds in a dryer, but not tenderizing meat.

Adam: Also, the idea of "is it safe to eat fresh road kill?" We think that would be just hilarious and gross.

• [TerribleNews]

  It appears to be not only safe, but also delicious, to eat fresh roadkill.

  • [Attack Hamster]

    TerribleNews, there is posh and so posh that one has a speech impediment such that the letter ´r´ and various vowels are beyond pronunciation.

• [Roy Trumbull]

  The eye being what it is I read cooking for Greeks instead of Geeks which is a subject in itself. In Philip Wyle’s classic “Generation of Vipers” he wrote a real polemic about the Greek American restaurant. He compared what the Greeks prepare for themselves versus what was served in their restaurants. How much of that was the fault of Greeks and how much of it was poor American taste I can’t say. The book was full of such rants.
  My favorite was that the bottom line of all advertising aimed at women was: “Lady, are you a good lay?”

• [Anonymous]

  I referenced this book in my final high school Chemistry assignment, didn’t know you were a BB contributor. Thanks for including some bits on starch in pasta, helped me out! :)

• [momfood]

  I’m as enchanted by the geekiness of the comment thread as by the article, and I can’t wait to get my hands on the book.

  SamSam said: “The cooking for engineers site, mentioned above, has the absolute best recipe diagrams. So much content in so little space. So clear too. You can see in one glance exactly what you need and what you’re going to do.”

  For me, they’re like the most impenetrable gibberish, because I just don’t think visually (or, apparently, as an engineer does). My engineer partner loves the diagrams; I shoot straight for the written recipes that accompany them. And by the way, his simple tiramisu is So. Fucking. Awesome.

• [Kosmoid]

  I think this might be a welcomed replacement of Alton Brown’s book. He wasn’t trained as a scientist and has made misstatements on his TV shows (WWII British pilots ate carrots for better night vision–actually a hoax to hide Britain’s discovery and use of radar), and he tends to make things over complicated (step ladder, rope and pulley for deep frying turkey).

  I see that on Amazon.com Jeff’s book can be bought together with two of Harold McGee’s, including On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, the ultimate food geek reference book.

• [S2]

  A worthy online adjunct for this book is the CookingForEngineers.com site. When Michael Chu started it as a simple blog-like critter, the site was noted for gems like this great article on Saturated Fats, Cholesterol, and Heart Disease ; web-monkeys took great delight in Michael’s use of <table>s in displaying recipes, such as the basic biscuit.

  Lately the site has become slick and busy, but the content is still wunnerful. (Hmm, I notice that Michael’s applying for a patent on “Tabular Recipe Notation”…guess that’s proof that an engineer still pulls the strings ;-)

  • [Kosmoid]

    I don’t know about an engineer trying to explain dyslipidemias without a background in human physiology. There are a number of problems with only making a quick scan of the article.

    I can’t imagine discussing cholesterol metabolism without mentioning Michael Brown’s work. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Joseph L. Goldstein in 1985 for describing the regulation of cholesterol metabolism. If you don’t, you don’t understand familial syndromes.

    I hope Jeff’s book has a better grounding.

• [SamSam]

  The cooking for engineers site, mentioned above, has the absolute best recipe diagrams. So much content in so little space. So clear too. You can see in one glance exactly what you need and what you’re going to do.

  A random example pulled from their home page: http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/83/Strawberry-Glazed-Angel-Food-Cake">Strawberry-glazed angel food cake. I can’t speak for the recipe (I have no reason to say that the recipes are actually better than anyone else’s, and may well be worse), but the whole 20 paragraphs or so is boiled down into the completely clear diagram half-way down the page.

• [aeon]

  More geeky cookery at Kamikaze Cookery: http://www.kamikazecookery.com/

• [Anonymous]

  What? Didn’t they interview Heston Blumethal? The man who flavoured duck by exploding a bomb of orange powder over it?