cooking @ home

What is sometimes almost indistinguishable to fresh? Canned. What’s better than fresh? Sometimes the answer is frozen. Sometimes the answer is canned. Notice I said “sometimes”. The fact that the answer is even that, as opposed to “never”, is in many ways, a modern wonder.

And I’ll bet for many of you reading this, this is news to you. I’m also guessing that many of you reading this are thinking I’ve really lost it this time. Nope. Actually I’ve found it — and I’m sharing it with you, and if you take it to heart, your cooking will never be quite the same again — in a good way.

Chefs and the Frozen Pea

Did you know chefs (yes, the five star restaurant kind, not just Moe’s Hamburger Joint) prefer frozen peas to fresh? It wasn’t until I saw Iron Chef America (ICA) “Battle Frozen Peas” that I found this out. And many moons later I saw Gordon Ramsey make something (was it his now famous Pea Risotto, not sure) with frozen peas. So what is the deal with these then? According to ICA host Alton Brown: “Well, because the sugar in peas quickly converts into starch, these peas are picked and preserved at the height of their quality. In fact, peas were one of the first successes that Clarence Birdseye had in his experiments involving flash-freezing vegetables.”

On another note, several generations in my family has been purchasing and enjoying cans of Le Sueur Very Young Small Sweet Peas — at least since the Thirties. Even though this has been a staple at every super market I know of since I was a kid, a look around the web for these showed that not only are they available in many a large chain store, but in some places they are actually sold as “gourmet”. (And trust me, when it comes to most vegetables, it’s either fresh first and frozen a close second, not canned. For instance why would I buy corn or string beans from a can? Meanwhile it’s the only way to get baked beans, peaches and pears in syrup and other sundries.)

The Canned Tomato

Chefs have long loved using canned tomatoes for sauces and cooking, though even more so today as the quality over the years has continued to increase. Across the board, when given a choice between a fresh, local, in-season tomato or canned, they will go with the fresh. But for the rest of the year, canned is what they work with because there is a consistently higher quality. We know ourselves going to the store at various times of the year that tomato can be on the sour side one week, mushy the next, hot house lacking in flavor the following week. Restaurants can’t run that way, top quality ones at least. They need to have two things a high quality and a high level of even consistency. Canned tomatoes give that to them.

The Tasteless Way It Was

You have to admit food-wise this really is a time of wonders. As a child in the Sixties, I ate TV dinners which were rubbery Swiss steak, dried cardboard potatoes, burnt peas and a apple cobbler that was like a rock and burnt your tongue on plates made from aluminium foil. I ate either watery or acid throat-burning spaghetti from cans. Chinese food was chop suey from Chun King.

This gave way in the early 80s to industrial grade convenience store boxes called microwaves in which you would put inside a sandwich sealed in plastic for several minutes and out would come a soggy yet hard roll that had no grain in it, between which was a blue-purple rubber thing labeled ham and a yellow-orange glue called cheese. How’s that for twenty years of “progress”, huh? Not!

The Food Revolution of Today

Two more decades and looked what’s happened. An entire cable network devoted to cooking and food. Several of the top reality shows on the tube are competitions by chefs and aspiring chefs. Food shows are major parts of TLC, Bravo and BBC America as well as still as staple of Public Broadcasting. Two hit movies this summer were about food, No Reservations and Pixar’s animated Ratatouille. It’s become not just what we eat, but what we watch; it’s becoming a part of the American culture, with catch phrases from “Yes, Chef!” to “You donkey!” to “You really need to get smell-o-vision” to “Yum-o!”

Back to the packaged food though. From those horrid sandwich things mentioned at the 80s convenience stores, it went to such frozen food in the 90s as Healthy Choice meals, the first “tv dinners” in my opinion to actually taste good, I mean really pleasant. To today’s frozen dinners like those from Bertolli which, like the commercials say, make it seem like you have a chef in your kitchen. And with the somewhat recent San Marzano tomato crops and the organic and artisanal movements in the food industry, these items are at an all time high of quality and production. Looking back, I swear I grew up in the culinary dark ages of processed foods. That’s right, I did.

So there’s so much now at our fingertips, that saves us time and gives us better quality, we would be foolish not to use these. What else besides canned tomatoes and frozen peas you ask?

Dried versus Canned Beans

You know this past year I’ve gotten into (finally) canned beans. Check out my own Mediterranean Four Bean Salad. Trust me that I mean it when I say it is delicious, and that it contains three kinds of canned beans and one frozen bean — and yes it’s delicious! This made me wonder though — as many things food do — is it worth getting the dried beans and rehydrating them overnight as our grandparents did? Or are canned beans nearly as good?

Thankfully, to a guy named George Duran and his short-lived quirky show called Ham on the Street, I have the answer. He let folks taste blindly from both a recipe made from canned beans and from dried. The consensus was either that no one could tell the difference or that the canned was better. Either way, I’ll happy take that result.

The Pumpkin and the Strawberry

Then the other day, I’m watching an episode of the Barefoot Contessa when Ina Gartan answered something else I was wondering about. To make a pumpkin pie, was it worth the trouble of getting the fresh pumpkin? And she said to use the canned, that she had done it both ways, that the fresh one was labor intensive, and that both tasted the same so use the can.

I’ve long known — and no doubt so have you — that canned frozen strawberries in syrup are reliably delicious and sweet, while getting fresh strawberries to be consistently sweet is both impossible and like rolling dice. You can never never tell looking from the outside of the fruit. (Besides, let’s face it, fresh strawberries just don’t come with that delicious syrup that can turn a bowl of breakfast cereal, an ice cream sundae or a homemade daqueri into something heaven sent.)

Alright, that’s all I got. I’m sure there’s other wonderful things out there. For now these are the ones that come to mind. (If you know of some, come to my blog, leave a comment and share your finds!)

There You Have It

Now, just to make sure my espousing the glories of some processed foods as cooking ingredients (and sometimes straight out foods ready to eat) isn’t mistaken. I’m in no way saying ditch the fresh. And I’m certainly not saying every canned or frozen veggie or fruit is going to be great either. There’s way too many sources, companies, methods of operation, varieties of produce, and a hundred other variables to ever say something so all-encompassing. In short, this is not a panacea. There’s plenty of yucky and mushy canned and frozen veggies out there for everyone, alas.

What I am saying is these things definitely do fit into my personal cooking philosophy, that if it’s just as good and easier, go with it. And if it’s better, well, I recall the last time I spent ten minutes shucking fresh peas from their pods and the end result (compared to frozen) just didn’t seem to justify the labor to me. And it turned out I was right.

Oh, and while I hadn’t mentioned this before because it’s fairly obvious, I find I still can’t end this article without mentioning it: The true wonder of frozen and canned is the shelf life compared to fresh. They are literally there whenever you need them. Frozen for months, and canned you could (if you had to) go years. Compare that with iffy tasting fresh that’s going to start turning fuzzy in your crisper drawer next week if you don’t get to them! When that’s tossed into the equation, it’s difficult not to say that sometimes, canned and frozen foods really are better than fresh.

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