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.
Good Eats in book form (Score:4, Insightful)
good eats with alton brown!!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Realy? (Score:1, Insightful)
Is it such a stretch that some one who enjoys intellectual pursuits would never laden down their bookshelf or kindle with a copy of the Larousse Gastronomique, or even Joy of Cooking?... Maybe its just me.
-= AC =-
Re:The staples (Score:4, Insightful)
That's more the loser's staples. Some of us like to apply the typical geek problem solving techniques and eye for quality in the kitchen as well as the computer room.
Re:Cooking for Engineers (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually... (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of the geeks I know are also foodies, and a large percentage of them love to cook.
Analysing the cooking process, you say? (Score:2, Insightful)
I've worked in IT. I've worked in kitchens.
And I don't get why people need to make them into the same pursuit.
Here are some things I've learned: you check steaks for doneness, not by shoving thermometers into them ... but by touching them and feeling for firmness.
You can tell how hot a pan is by watching how oil moves across its surface.
You can tell how hot a pan is by listening to the patch of food as it sears / sautees / sweats.
At a certain point, you're just collecting more data while losing out on the visceral, five senses appeal of doing something that can be intensely creative.
But maybe it's just me.
Re:Cooking for Engineers (Score:2, Insightful)
False advertising. What kind of engineer prefers US customary units over metric?
An American one?
Boolean Stoves (Score:5, Insightful)
When my wife and I first got married, she was an awful cook. I mean, it was really bad, like she was trying to kill me and collect the life insurance. So one night, I analyzed her cooking technique. I discovered that for her, the stove was a boolean device. That is, it was either on (10) or off (0). All those numbers in between 0 and 10 were there for decoration. Luckily my wife was really smart, getting As in organic chemistry for example. So i started speaking a different language.
Cooking is all about heat transfer. Heat will conduct from the outside of food to the inside of food (microwaves aside) at the same rate, depending on the substance. If you turn the heat up, it won't simply cook faster. The outside will burn before enough heat has transferred to the inside. This was enough for her to have an epiphany, suddenly realizing what all those numbers between 0 and 10 were for.
Re:The staples (Score:4, Insightful)
Cooking shares a lot of the qualities that make programming a fun hobby for many people. You can generally get fairly quick feedback on whether or not what you're doing is working and so you can iterate and learn quickly. While there can be benefits to having nicer and pricier hardware, it's definitely possible to get good results with older and/or cheaper equipment. There is tons of "open source" material out there to learn from and use, probably thousands of websites with recipes, some are even decently well organized. And while it's hard to find cooking ingredients that are free, you can make lots of good food while only spending a small amount on materials.
And while a clever code hack might impress a handful of geeks, a good meal will impress almost everyone.
Re:The staples (Score:3, Insightful)
Geeks of both genders, this is COMPLETELY TRUE.
If you prepare a GOOD home-cooked meal for a friend you are romantically interested in, you win a lot of points. It's worth more than taking someone out for dinner (as long as you still do that once in a while) and WAY more than ordering delivery. It shows that you have some useful IRL skills that geeks are commonly assumed not to have. The more from-scratch it is, the more points you can theoretically obtain if your Other has also invested time in learning to cook.
No mac-and-cheese and hotdogs though... make something good like the parent poster mentioned!
Re:Cooking for Engineers (Score:5, Insightful)
One that shops at American stores. I'm an engineer. I do almost everything in metric, at work everything is in metric.
But butter is still sold in 1/2 cup sticks. Milk is still sold in gallons, cans of stuff are usually in floz.
Same with building stuff for my house: 2x4s are 6 or 8' long.
It's just easier to leave it in the units that it comes in.
Re:The staples (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't really understand why all engineers/programmers don't love to cook. It is truly a systematic discipline that you can steadily improve if you have a little patience and decent tastebuds. Not to mention "normal" people tend to appreciate a good meal far more than some nifty code snippet
And by the way, just as you can apply engineering techniques to cooking, you can apply them in the bedroom as well. Pay attention to your inputs and the sort of outputs they give, and iterate, iterate, iterate until you reach an optimal solution!
Re:Cooking for Engineers (Score:5, Insightful)
For instance, I can easily measure in my hand a tsp or TBSP of something, I can pour about a cup of liquid easily, but I have no notion in my head what I'd try to measure if I did something in grams, or other metric units.
Don't even get me started in trying to tackle the concept of heat and cooking times in C vs F.
That being said...I think the most valuable new recipe book would be one that actually emphasized and re-enforced what actual PORTION size is supposed to be?!?!
I'm in the middle of working out, losing weight (down 30lbs...working on about 25lbs more)...and aside from moving away from processed foods and carbs, learning portion control has been a true eye opener!!
For instance, a portion of beef, let's say a steak is only 4oz. Do you have any real idea how small that is?
I didn't until I weighed it...and then, I had to weigh it about 3 more times as that I could not believe a bit of meat that small was what is supposed to be a normal portion of your meal. About the size of a deck of cards.
Well, I've been weighing foods to get that picture in my head what a portion is supposed to be. I've been trying to eat meals about 4-5 times a day..and that keeps from getting overly hungry, but man, it takes a little work to get used to eating such a small amount.
In the past, for lunch, I'd have a HUGE tupperware thing filled with spaghetti and soaked in red gravy and meat sauce. I'd have to guess I was easily eating 3-4 lbs of that for a single lunch portion.
Anyway...talk about an eye opener. I think if we could re-enforce what a true portion of food at a meal was, we'd go a LONG way to overcoming obesity.
Fortunately, I found that by increasing the % of protein and fat in my diet and doing practically away with junk carbs (I try to only get them from veggies and fruit and some whole grain products)...my appetite did naturally fade away to a more normal level. That and eating throughout the day helps you to not get voraciously hungry, and want to over eat portions.
Re:The staples (Score:4, Insightful)
Good cookware is certainly nice to have, but it's by no means required, and you certainly don't need to go out and spend a thousand bucks on knives and pans when you're just starting out. A sharp knife is essential, but even a cheaper knife can be plenty sharp for you to get started.
Begin with the cheaper stuff until you learn what tools you really prefer and need, then you can make better choices as to what to spend serious money on, plus you'll have had an opportunity to become better educated on which products actually are higher quality. Plus you'll hopefully have learned about how to properly care for your tools before you buy the good stuff.
Lower price stuff isn't always garbage. You can make some totally awesome stuff with cast iron, and that stuff is cheap as hell.
Your point stands, really good quality stuff often costs more money, and it can definitely be worth it. But it's not 100% necessary to make delicious food. Also, I think it can be educational to have tried similar cooking techniques on varying quality equipment, seeing how the different tools affect the food can tell you a lot about what is actually happening on the heat.
Re:Cooking for Engineers (Score:4, Insightful)
With no assertion intended that portion control does not work, and the further disclaimer that you *MAY* die a horrible death of heart disease trying to do this, from first hand experience I have to say that the statistics don't lie: Doing Atkins/Southbeach- where you basically get to eat all the meat and cheese you want, most of the vegetables you want, and very very few processed carbohydrates:
(1) You can eat all you want, portion size bedamned. Your body WILL tell you are full.
(2) For 98% of the population, you WILL drop weight, and you won't be hungry. Most- I'd say 90%- will also have more energy than you ever did in your adult life while doing it.
There is still a long way to go in diet science, but the low carb diet makes a lot more practical sense than its predecessors where you want to kill yourself out of hunger pains or need the mind control of a tenth-degree blackbelt to stop from eating a big-ass steak*
* $diety bless America and our portion sizes.
Re:Cook's Illustrated, America's Test Kitchen (Score:4, Insightful)
The moment I saw TFA, my response was, "yeah, but is it better than Cook's Illustrated?"
I got a subscription from my girlfriend's mom a couple years ago after I told her how cool it was while staying at their house. My step-mom also bought me their book for Christmas.
Last Thanksgiving, my girlfriend and I were going to my family's for dinner. We decided to bake pies and used recipes from CI. The two of us, who have never baked a pie from scratch before, turned out the most delicious pies at the dinner, beating out several career homemakers in the process (who are certainly some of the best cooks I know). The secret? Vodka in the crust. It's a very small amount and burns off in the oven, but it's wet so it holds the crust together, but dries it out during baking so that it's nice and flaky and nomnomnom.
Their method for pork schnitzels is also fantastic.
Re:The staples (Score:3, Insightful)
> More misogynistic attitudes like this is exactly what we need to drive more women out of the industry.
Feminism run amok is why the ability to cook is a very advantageous male mating skill.
Generations of females have been indoctrinated into avoiding the domestic arts out of some sort of misguided notion of feminism.