Cooking Issues

Kenji is awesome, and probably the best reason to read seriouseats. But for anyone who enjoys food science, you really have to start with Harold McGee's classic "On Food and Cooking":

http://smile.amazon.com/Food-Cooking-Science-Lore-Kitchen/dp/0684800012/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1446716055&sr=8-1&keywords=on+food+and+cooking

(Sorry for the enormous URL.)

Also, I binge-listen to Dave Arnold's podcast, "Cooking Issues" on Heritage Radio network. A treasure trove of food science facts, going well beyond eggs: sous vide meat, hydrocolloids, liquid nitrogen cocktails, etc.

http://heritageradionetwork.org/series/cooking-issues/

(You really have to give the show a chance, though -- it's very conversational, and less... polished than your typical show.)

Also, anyone interested in food science should really consider an iSi whipper for booze infusion and other experimentation. No really, please do it, your life will be better (or at least boozier):

http://www.cookingissues.com/index.html%3Fp=4463.html

(Arnold has progressed the technique a lot since then, but this primer is pretty good nonetheless. The FCI blog is basically dead; the podcast and Twitter are his current outlets.)

But yeah, I screw around in the kitchen a lot (though cook less useful food than my wife does). Pressure cooker, weird enzymes, hydrocolloids... but the iSi whipper booze-infusion technique is my all-time favorite kitchen hack. You can drink toasted hazelnut bourbon in a Manhattan like, six minutes…

FCI recently performed an empirical comparison of shaking vs. stirring:

Shaking completely chills, dilutes and aerates a drink in around 15 seconds, after which the drink stops changing radically and reaches relative equilibrium. Shaking is basically insensitive to bartender-induced variables. …bartender skill is very important in a stirred cocktail. Because stirring doesn’t reach equilibrium, stirred drinks are warmer and less diluted than shaken cocktails. Stirred drinks, unlike shaken ones, are not aerated. Stirring does not alter the texture of a drink—it merely chills and dilutes. A properly diluted cocktail stored at -5 degrees Celsius in a freezer is indistinguishable from a properly stirred one. http://www.cookingissues.com/2010/09/02/cocktail-science-in-general-part-1-of-2/

If you are unfamiliar with the author, Dave Arnold is a former instructor at the French Culinary Institute, a bar owner/operator in NYC (Booker & Dax (closed), Existing Conditions (closed), and Bar Contra (https://www.barcontra.com)), a cooking equipment designer and manufacturer (https://www.bookeranddax.com), sharer of lots of knowledge (e.g. https://cookingissues.com/primers/sous-vide/part-i-introduction-to-low-temperature-cooking-and-sous-vide/), James Beard Award winning book author (https://www.kitchenartsandletters.com/products/liquid-intelligence-the-art-and-science-of-the-perfect-cocktail), and a weekly podcast host (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cooking-issues-with-dave-arnold/id1572356745).

I highly recommend anything he works on.

"In this case, poaching or hard boiling an egg is so utterly simple, done in mere minutes, that it is simply impossible that this device could make it easier. And the grotesque proposed waste of energy borders on the absurd."

said like someone who has never used the sous vide cooking method. this is about precise cooking, which yeilds very specific results; it's very different than your 'toss a bunch of eggs into boiling water for 10 minutes! duhhh' method.

you cant get these results with your 'utterly simple' method(s): http://www.cookingissues.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/eggchart2.jpg

and we're just talking eggs here. your steak wont look like this either: https://d3awvtnmmsvyot.cloudfront.net/api/file/clFhHJTkRraOg8cc1MiD

Well, the salient point there is "prior to a low-temp cook". In that post:

http://www.cookingissues.com/2011/10/12/to-salt-or-not-to-salt-thats-the-searing-question/

Arnold was using sous-vide on the steaks, which has much different cooking characteristics than high heat cooking.

I've generally found that liberally salting steaks with kosher salt up to several hours in advance of grilling or roasting improves the flavor and texture substantially. Serious Eats backs me up, here:

http://www.seriouseats.com/2011/03/the-food-lab-more-tips-for-perfect-steaks.html

Dave Arnold tried this and was not impressed: https://cookingissues.com/2009/06/11/maillard-pipe-potatoes/

----------------------------------------

As you can see from the photo, the potato turns a dark mahogany all the way through (cause it is 355° all the way through). Even the water turns mahogany.

This experiment taught me that not all Maillard reactions produce good flavors. The Maillard pipe potato tastes awful and smells acrid. Damn it’s bad—but it’s instructive.

----------------------------------------