14 Things Your Grandmother Got Wrong About Cooking

Grandmas are the best. Who among us doesn't have cherished memories of standing by our grandmother's hip, watching her work magic in the kitchen? There's just something about a grandma's touch that makes food taste even better. That said, just because your grandmother was an excellent cook doesn't mean that everything she had to say about cooking was correct. In fact, there's a good chance your grandma passed down some bogus cooking myths in addition to all her good advice.

We now understand the science of food more than we did when our elders were learning how to cook. In previous generations, cooks knew that certain techniques worked, but they didn't necessarily know why. And so chefs wrote cookbooks filled with food myths. Over generations, these myths became set in stone as unquestionable food facts. Here in the 21st century, it's our duty to shed light on the murky world of culinary falsehoods. Sorry grandma, but these are some things you probably got wrong about cooking.

Mushrooms are like delicious little sponges, soaking up whatever oil, marinade, or other liquid you cook them in. Going by that reasoning, conventional wisdom says that you shouldn't wash mushrooms with water because they will absorb too much liquid and become soggy. Yet, the problem with this advice is that mushrooms are really dirty. To be fair, Southern Kitchen says that the grit you find on commercially-grown mushrooms is sterilized peat moss that won't hurt you, but it's still unappetizing. And if you splurge on wild mushrooms, they will be covered in dirt and who knows what else from wherever they were foraged from. What's more, traditional mushroom cleaning methods like wiping with a towel or brush take forever, and they never work as well as you would hope.

So, what's the solution? Just wash them. It turns out that generations of cooks have been afraid of washing mushrooms for no reason. Serious Eats weighed a batch of mushrooms before and after soaking them in a water bath and found that the fungi absorbed a mere 2 percent of their mass in water weight. Even better, the added water made no difference in their flavor or texture after cooking. So, go ahead and go those shrooms a good rinse.

In general, it's a good idea to season food throughout all stages of the cooking process to ensure maximum deliciousness. There are a few exceptions to this rule, like burgers, where salting too early negatively impacts the texture of the food. Many chefs claim that scrambled eggs fall into this category, saying that you should wait to season them until after they're mostly cooked. Even Gordon Ramsay repeats this "fact" in his much-loved scrambled egg recipe. This myth makes intuitive sense because salt causes proteins to denature and changes their composition. This is why pre-salted burgers become unsettlingly bouncy.

Yet a Serious Eats experiment concluded that pre-salting scrambled eggs had very little effect on their cooked texture, and may have even made them slightly softer and more luscious than eggs that were salted after cooking. Food scientist Harold McGee theorized that the salt might have acted as a barrier that prevented the egg proteins from bonding too tightly and becoming tough. The real way to ensure soft, creamy scrambled eggs every time is to cook them over low heat and avoid overcooking. Eggs that have stayed in a hot pan for too long are going to be rubbery every time.

Waiting for a pot of water to come to a boil is boring. Many people believe they can speed up the process by adding salt to the water. This is convenient because you usually want to season the water you use to blanch vegetables or cook pasta anyway. It's true that saltwater can boil more quickly than fresh water under certain circumstances, but you're unlikely to be able to take advantage of this phenomenon when you're in the kitchen.

Live Science reported that in order to measurably speed up the boiling time for water, you'd have to add an unpalatable amount of salt to the pot. A solution of 20 percent% salt by weight will come to a boil significantly faster than the same volume of pure water, but that much salt would render food inedible. Even if you salt your water until it tastes like the ocean, you're unlikely to reach higher than 4 percent salt content. That said, salting your cooking water is generally a good idea because it helps season boiled foods, but it's not going to save you any time in the kitchen.

Marinating is one of the most misunderstood and mythologized kitchen techniques. Cook's Illustrated ran tests to uncover the truth about marinades and discovered that pretty much every well-known fact about the technique is either misleading or downright false.

Most people think marinades season meat more deeply than just rubbing the outside with spices. Recipes often call for long soaks in hopes of allowing the marinade to fully penetrate the meat. In fact, almost all the flavorings stay on the outside of the food no matter how long you let it sit. In fact, it's actually a bad idea to let the meat hang out in a marinade for too long, especially if it contains acidic ingredients like vinegar. You may have heard that marinades make meat more tender, but it's more accurate to say that they break the meat down into a kind of paste. 

Over-marinated meat will develop a strangely soft texture on the exterior, but the interior will stay tough. Marinating is a useful technique, but it needs to be deployed wisely. Stick to cuts of meat with a high surface area to volume ratio to get maximum flavor impact, and don't let ingredients hang out in acidic environments for too long.

Fresh grapefruit used to be such a popular breakfast food that it came with its own special sharpened spoon to scoop segments out of the fruit. Grapefruit spoons are mostly a thing of the past these days, but you may remember your grandmother using one. When she ate grapefruit, she probably sprinkled it with sugar to try to mask the fruit's inherent bitterness. It turns out that she might have been better off shaking some salt over it instead.

Renowned British chef Heston Blumenthal writes in The Guardian that salt can make bitter foods taste sweet. Sugar covers up bitterness if you add enough of it, but salt actually helps to neutralize bitter flavors. Science Notes says that the sodium in salt interrupts your tongue's ability to sense bitter tastes while simultaneously boosting your sweetness receptors. For that reason, many people say that coffee tastes better if it's brewed with a small amount of salt.

Most of our grandmothers had a turkey baster hiding somewhere deep in their utensil drawers. This mysterious tool that looked like a supersized eye dropper only saw action during the winter holidays, when our grannies would use it to squirt drippings over turkeys while they cooked. Allegedly, this cumbersome ritual produced a moister bird. But many modern recipes for turkey skip basting altogether. Is basting unnecessary, or should we all buy turkey basters for our next Thanksgiving dinner?

Cook's Illustrated set out to determine whether basting actually improved roast turkey. They found that both basted and unbasted turkey breasts retained pretty much the same amount of moisture. Basting did encourage the turkey skin to brown more evenly, but testers thought that the difference was primarily cosmetic and didn't affect the flavor. If you want a perfect brown crust on your bird, techniques like dry brining or coating the skin in butter will give you the results you want without making you open the oven door every 20 minutes while you're trying to cook a Thanksgiving feast. These methods also result in crisper skin than what you'll get on a basted bird.

Oversalting is one of the few cooking mistakes that can irrevocably ruin a dish. There's no worse feeling than watching the top of your salt shaker fall off to release tablespoons of salt into food you've invested time and effort into preparing. There are some old wives' tales about how you can rescue oversalted food, but they promise more than they can deliver.

One of the most commonly cited tricks for removing extra salt from soup or stew is to add a peeled, raw potato to the broth. In theory, this works because the potato pulls sodium out of the soup. Chef Catherine DeOrio tells Insider that this tip is completely false. Potatoes are very absorbent, but they drink up liquid just as much as they absorb salt. That means adding a potato to broth won't magically make it taste less salty. Instead, DeOrio says that your best bet is to try to balance the salt with other flavors like acidity and sweetness. If your dish is still too salty, your only other option is to add more ingredients to the pot to dilute sodium levels to an acceptable level.