Cooking Myths That Home Cooks Still Believe

This myth has been around for over a century, popularized in part by 19th-century food science writing that has since been thoroughly debunked. When you sear a steak or chicken breast, you get a beautiful brown crust because sugars and proteins react under high heat — that's the Maillard reaction, and it's genuinely delicious. But that crust is porous. Juices still escape. The real key to a moist result is not searing order, but avoiding overcooking. A well-rested, properly cooked piece of meat will be juicy whether you sear it first or not.

The sticky feeling of freshly drained pasta is actually working in your favor. That thin coating of starch is what allows sauce — whether it's a chunky tomato ragù or a simple olive oil — to grip the noodle rather than pool at the bottom of the bowl. Rinsing with cold water removes that starch and simultaneously cools the pasta, which means it won't properly absorb the sauce when you toss them together. The only time rinsing makes sense is when you're making a cold pasta salad and genuinely need to halt the cooking and cool the noodles quickly.

The physics here is real but the effect is negligible. To meaningfully raise the boiling point of a standard pot of water, you'd need an impractical amount of salt — far more than any recipe calls for. The actual reason to salt your pasta water is flavor: it seasons the pasta from the inside out as it absorbs liquid during cooking. A well-salted pot of pasta water — described by many cooks as tasting "pleasantly like the sea" — produces noticeably better-tasting pasta than unsalted water, regardless of what it does to the boiling point.

This myth has pushed many home cooks toward plastic boards in the belief that they're more hygienic. But research conducted at UC Davis in the 1990s found that bacteria introduced to wooden board surfaces became undetectable relatively quickly, while plastic boards — especially those with knife scars — could harbor bacteria even after washing. That said, no cutting board is completely risk-free. The key practices are the same for both materials: wash thoroughly with hot, soapy water after contact with raw meat or poultry, replace boards that are deeply scarred, and never use the same surface for raw proteins and ready-to-eat foods without washing in between.

The smoke point concern for olive oil is often overstated. Refined olive oil has an even higher smoke point than extra virgin. For typical home cooking — sautéing vegetables, finishing a pan sauce, roasting at moderate oven temperatures — extra virgin olive oil performs perfectly well. The smoke point issue becomes relevant only at the very high temperatures used for deep frying or searing in a screaming-hot cast iron pan, where a neutral high-heat oil is a better choice. Understanding how different oils and fats behave is part of the bigger picture covered in how fat works in cooking.

A very cold piece of meat hitting a hot pan creates an uneven temperature gradient: the outside overcooks before the center reaches the right temperature. Letting a steak or thick chop rest on the counter for 20–30 minutes before cooking helps it cook more evenly. That said, food safety is a real consideration: the USDA advises against leaving perishable foods in the "danger zone" (40°F–140°F) for more than two hours in total. A brief rest before cooking is reasonable; leaving meat out for an extended period is not. Always use a thermometer to confirm doneness rather than relying on appearance.