Cooking For Geeks 312
jsuda writes "You've got to have a lot of confidence and nerve to write and try to sell a nearly 400 page book on cooking to the take-out pizza and cola set. No cookbook is likely to turn many geeks into chefs or take them away from their computer screens. However, even though Cooking for Geeks contains a large number of recipes, it is not a conventional cookbook but a scientific explanation of the how and why of cooking which will certainly appeal to that group, as well as to cooking professionals and intellectually curious others." Read on for the rest of jsuda's review.
The author is a geek himself and brings "geek-like" approaches to the subject matter - deep intellectual curiosity, affinity for details, appreciation of problem solving and hacking, scientific method, and a love of technology. What is even better is his filtering of cooking concepts by a computer coder's framework, analogizing recipes to executable code, viewing of ingredients as inputs and as variables, running processes over and over in a logical manner to test and improve outcomes. This is not a mere literary shoe-horning of cooking concepts into a coder's framework but an ingenuous approach to the topics that should loudly resonate with geeks.| Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food | |
| author | Jeff Potter |
| pages | 432 |
| publisher | O'Reilly Media |
| rating | 9/10 |
| reviewer | jsuda |
| ISBN | 0596805888 |
| summary | an excellent and intriguing resource for anyone who wants to experiment with cooking |
The subject matter includes selecting and using kitchen and cooking hardware; prepping inventory; calibrating equipment (especially your oven, using sugar); understanding tastes and smells; the fundamental difference between cooking and baking (and the personality types which gravitate to one form or the other); the importance of gluten and the three major types of leavening (biological, chemical, and mechanical); the types of cooking; using time and temperatures; how to use air as a tool; the chemistry of food combinations; and very thorough and detailed discussions of food handling and safety. The book is organized into seven chapters and includes an appendix dealing with cooking for people with allergies. The recipes are indexed in the front of the book.
The major conventional flavor types of salt, sugar, acids, and alcohol have been supplemented by modern industrial elements - E- Numbered (a Dewey decimal system-like index) additives, colloids, gels, foams, and other yummy things! All are itemized, charted, and explained in the chapter entitled "Playing with Chemistry." A whole chapter (and an interview with mathematician, Douglas Baldwin) is devoted to the latest and greatest food preparation technique - sous vide - cooking food in a temperature-controlled water bath.
Threaded through the sections are short sidebar interviews of mostly computer and techie types who are serious cooks or involved in the food industry. Some of these contributors are Adam Savage (of Myth Busters fame) on scientific technique, Tim O'Reilly (CEO of the book's publisher) on scones and jam, Nathan Myhrvold, on Moderist cuisine, and others. Other interviews deal with taste sensitivities, food mysteries, industrial hardware, pastry chef insights, and many more. There is an insightful section just on knives and how to use and care for them.
Anyone who is interested in cooking will learn from this book. I now pay attention to things I've never heard of before: browning methods like caramelization and the Maillard processes, savory as a major taste, transglutaminase (a.k.a. meat glue), for example. There is stuff I didn't really want to know - "if you've eaten fish you've eaten worms."
Although one of the strengths of the book is the systematic organization, there are useful tips spread throughout. For example, keeping a pizza stone permanently in your oven will help even out heat distribution; storing vegetables correctly requires knowing whether they admit ethylene gas or not (a chart is included); you can test your smell sensitivity profile by using a professional scratch and sniff test kit obtainable from the University of Pennsylvania. Whatever specialized information not contained in the book is referenced to external sources, especially on the Internet.
If all of this is not stimulus enough for the geek crowd, how about learning how you can spectacularly kill yourself cooking with dry ice, liquid nitrogen, blowtorches, and especially an electrocuted hotdog. Cool! This is mad scientist stuff. Engineering-minded types can learn how to make their own ice cream machine from Legos. You'll also learn how NOT to kill your guests with bacteria and other toxins.
The production is nicely done with easily readable text, plentiful drawings and charts, color captions, and many other quality production features. Weights are based in both grams and US volume-based measurements.
You can purchase Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Re:Good Eats in book form (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Cooking for computer scientists (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not sure I need this book.
The human prestomach (Score:3, Informative)
That section is sometimes called a kitchen.
And this prestomach is why we don't need as huge teeth, jaws or gizzards (plus grit) to eat certain foods, compared to other animals who don't have a prestomach. It also allows us to eat (and live on) a wider variety of foods than we would otherwise - the prestomach can help reduce toxicity, increase palatibility and nutrient uptake.
Because this prestomach is not attached to our body we are more mobile in some ways, and less mobile in other ways.
A human without a prestomach is a bit like a cow with one less stomach. The cow might still survive, but it is less likely to thrive (unless it has access to a special diet).
Re:Cooking for Engineers (Score:3, Informative)
And some really cool stuff:
http://cookingissues.wordpress.com/ [wordpress.com]
(The French Culinary Institute's Tech'N Stuff Blog)
The best scientific cooking articles I've ever read!
Also, another cool one is:
http://blog.khymos.org/ [khymos.org]
with its fine hydrocolloid recipe collection:
http://blog.khymos.org/recipe-collection/ [khymos.org]
Re:Cooking for Engineers (Score:3, Informative)
Well, sorry the real site is:
http://www.cookingissues.com/ [cookingissues.com]
The wordpress site is no longer updated.
Re:Cook's Illustrated, America's Test Kitchen (Score:3, Informative)
I wish I hadn't commented, but MOD PARENT UP.
Cook's Illustrated is not cheap, but is amazing. Parent is dead on with everything.
http://www.cooksillustrated.com/ [cooksillustrated.com]
Re:Cooking for Engineers (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cooking for Engineers (Score:5, Informative)
As someone who has recently went on a (self-inflicted) diet and exercise program, I want to chime in that this is pretty much right on the money. Pretty much the most important thing is getting your meal count up and your portion size down. Your body only has about five hundred calories of L2 cache, and topping that means your metabolism is having to go to main memory, which is something you want to avoid.
Re:Cook's Illustrated, America's Test Kitchen (Score:1, Informative)
At the risk of being a nitpicky, you forgot to mention that alcohol won't develop gluten which is a big problem with pie dough, and why traditional pie dough is dry and hard to work with.