The Importance of Good Ingredients
For years, I've taken the "buy fresh, quality ingredients" gospel at face value. When I switched to these quality ingredients - the organic cage-free eggs, the King Arthur flour, the sun-ripened tomatoes - I've never noticed much of an improvement, except with the tomatoes (Who wants a tomato that doesn't even have an aroma? Aren't aroma and taste almost the same thing?), but it seemed like the right thing to do.
Lately, though, I've has occasion to use some sub-par ingredients. I didn't expect to see much of a difference, but boy howdy was I wrong.
First: About a month back, I ran out of flour. (I know, I know, how do you run out of flour? But I did.) When I ran to the grocery, they didn't have any of my good ol' King Arthur, so I bought Gold Medal instead. It used to be good enough, right? And then I set out to make pizza dough with this stuff. I have a bread machine pizza dough recipe I've been using without fail for many years now. And with the Gold Medal, for the first time, it was a disaster. The dough was sticky and lacked any sort of body; it wasn't gloopy, not quite, but there was no way it was going to turn into a nice flat disk for me, either. I tried again a few days later, and this time I watched the machine during the initial mix cycle, adding flour until it got to that just-right texture where it had spring to it.
Would you believe it took an extra half a cup of flour? And the resulting dough just... wasn't that great.
Some time later, a relative going on vacation gave me some extra eggs so they wouldn't go bad, and I hard-boiled them for breakfast. I'm used to using the fancy-schmancy cage-free, hormone-free, antibiotic-free organic brown eggs. These were your standard white commercial eggs. Again, I expected no meaningful difference, but I couldn't have been more wrong. The subpar eggs looked beautiful, to be sure. I had hit the perfect point in boiling where the yolks are firm and golden, with no grayish ring around them. But they tasted just awful; so bad I couldn't even make myself eat a whole one. They weren't spoiled, mind you, they just lacked a certain ineffable egginess that I look for in a hard-boiled egg. Also they tasted faintly of burning rubber.
So I guess the necessity of good ingredients has won me over, if in a backwards fashion - you don't necessarily know what you're missing unless, well, you KNOW what you're missing.
