I took a trip to my local university library once and found the food science section. It made On Food and Cooking look like Green Eggs and Ham in comparison and I learned more than I cared to about pineapple canning.
(To be fair, McGee’s work does exactly what I did but with multiple orders of magnitude more effort: summarizing food science journal papers into single paragraphs.)
One thing that’s always struck me as fun about cooking as a science is that your reagents need to be live calibrated by look and feel. Want to use the right amount of cyder vinegar but it’s from a brand / manufacturer you don’t know? You’re going to have to live titrate it with your mouth!
Don’t even get me started on inconsistencies between egg manufacturers. Clara’s lecithin content seems to be at least 10% stronger than Number 4’s, and she is also more tolerant of being stroked.
Those egg manufacturers can be temperamental, eh? Perhaps Clara’s found some midnight snacks somewhere. I know mine got rodents every now and then to supplement the feed, but I never measured lecithin content on the, uh, production output.
(To be fair, McGee’s work does exactly what I did but with multiple orders of magnitude more effort: summarizing food science journal papers into single paragraphs.)
One thing that’s always struck me as fun about cooking as a science is that your reagents need to be live calibrated by look and feel. Want to use the right amount of cyder vinegar but it’s from a brand / manufacturer you don’t know? You’re going to have to live titrate it with your mouth!
Don’t even get me started on inconsistencies between egg manufacturers. Clara’s lecithin content seems to be at least 10% stronger than Number 4’s, and she is also more tolerant of being stroked.