The Curious Cook

Examines the biochemistry behind cooking and food preparation, rejecting such common notions as that searing meat seals in juices and that cutting lettuce causes it to brown faster

A requisite countertop companion for all home chefs, Keys to Good Cooking distils the modern scientific understanding of cooking and translates it into immediately useful information. The book provides simple statements of fact and advice, along with brief explanations that help cooks understand why, and apply that understanding to other situations. Not a cookbook, Keys to Good Cooking is, simply put, a book about how to cook well. A work of astounding scholarship and originality, this is a concise and authoritative guide designed to help home cooks navigate the ever-expanding universe of recipes and ingredients and appliances, and arrive at the promised land of a satisfying dish.

This engaging and approachable (and humorous!) guide to taste and flavor will make you a more skilled and confident home cook. How to Taste outlines the underlying principles of taste, and then takes a deep dive into salt, acid, bitter, sweet, fat, umami, bite (heat), aromatics, and texture. You'll find out how temperature impacts your enjoyment of the dishes you make as does color, alcohol, and more. The handbook goes beyond telling home cooks what ingredients go well together or explaining cooking ratios. You'll learn how to adjust a dish that's too salty or too acidic and how to determine when something might be lacking. It also includes recipes and simple kitchen experiments that illustrate the importance of salt in a dish, or identifies whether you're a "supertaster" or not. Each recipe and experiment highlights the chapter's main lesson. How to Taste will ultimately help you feel confident about why and how various components of a dish are used to create balance, harmony, and deliciousness.

In this book, Harold McGee applies the scientific method to his activities with pots and pans, examining many common foods and cooking methods.

A hiking and exploring guidebook to Orgeon's Columbia River Gorge. Features day hikes, waterfalls, scenic wonders, and must-see attractions.

Are you the innovative type, the cook who marches to a different drummer -- used to expressing your creativity instead of just following recipes? Are you interested in the science behind what happens to food while it's cooking? Do you want to learn what makes a recipe work so you can improvise and create your own unique dish? More than just a cookbook, Cooking for Geeks applies your curiosity to discovery, inspiration, and invention in the kitchen. Why is medium-rare steak so popular? Why do we bake some things at 350° F/175° C and others at 375° F/190° C? And how quickly does a pizza cook if we overclock an oven to 1,000° F/540° C? Author and cooking geek Jeff Potter provides the answers and offers a unique take on recipes -- from the sweet (a "mean" chocolate chip cookie) to the savory (duck confit sugo). This book is an excellent and intriguing resource for anyone who wants to experiment with cooking, even if you don't consider yourself a geek. Initialize your kitchen and calibrate your tools Learn about the important reactions in cooking, such as protein denaturation, Maillard reactions, and caramelization, and how they impact the foods we cook Play with your food using hydrocolloids and sous vide cooking Gain firsthand insights from interviews with researchers, food scientists, knife experts, chefs, writers, and more, including author Harold McGee, TV personality Adam Savage, chemist Hervé This, and xkcd "My own session with the book made me feel a lot more confident in my cooking." --Monica Racic,The New Yorker "I LOVE this book. It's inspiring, invigorating, and damned fun to spend time inside the mind of 'big picture' cooking. I'm Hungry!" --Adam Savage, co-host of Discovery Channel's MythBusters "In his enchanting, funny, and informative book, Cooking for Geeks (O'Reilly), Jeff Potter tells us why things work in the kitchen and why they don't." -- Barbara Hanson, NewYork Daily News

Following on from the book On Food and Cooking, Harold McGee investigates the science of everyday cooking. The result is this book which applies a scientific method to his activities with pots and pans, examining many traditional practices and the biochemical nature of common foods.

Based on the popular Harvard University and edX course, Science and Cooking explores the scientific basis of why recipes work. The spectacular culinary creations of modern cuisine are the stuff of countless articles and social media feeds. But to a scientist they are also perfect pedagogical explorations into the basic scientific principles of cooking. In Science and Cooking, Harvard professors Michael Brenner, Pia Sörensen, and David Weitz bring the classroom to your kitchen to teach the physics and chemistry underlying every recipe. Why do we knead bread? What determines the temperature at which we cook a steak, or the amount of time our chocolate chip cookies spend in the oven? Science and Cooking answers these questions and more through hands-on experiments and recipes from renowned chefs such as Christina Tosi, Joanne Chang, and Wylie Dufresne, all beautifully illustrated in full color. With engaging introductions from revolutionary chefs and collaborators Ferran Adria and José Andrés, Science and Cooking will change the way you approach both subjects—in your kitchen and beyond.