Blooming cocoa powder
You see it all the time in recipes for brownies, chocolate cakes, and pretty much anything else with cocoa powder: the instruction to pour boiling water (or sometimes coffee, or even red wine) over the cocoa powder to “bloom” it….
On leavening: baking soda
During a surprisingly memorable middle school talent show act, a classmate of my older sister staged a sort of cooking show where she “demonstrated” how to bake something–maybe cookies? Under the requisite floppy chef’s hat, she mixed and stirred and…
Pork and cooking temperatures
If you’re in Boston, the Museum of Science deserves a trip solely for the current exhibit on modernist cooking’s iconic Nathan Myhrvold and the photographs from his multi-volume Modernist Cuisine. The books, while stunning, don’t have quite the same effect as…
Cocoa powder and cookies
Cocoa powder holds a special place in my heart as the ingredient that got me into food science. During my senior year of college, I wanted to pursue research in food science but my school didn’t have any faculty in…
Why rest crepe batter?
In reading a bunch of crepe recipes in preparation for the crepe cake, one common element stuck out to me: they all called for resting the batter before cooking. Times varied from an hour to overnight, and none of them…
The myth of turkey and tryptophan
As we all look forward to some socially acceptable gluttony tomorrow, let’s fast-forward to the inevitable consequences: the food coma. You know how it goes. You say you’ll just get a bite of everything, but then the cranberry sauce really…
Eggs and cookie texture
I generally keep a pretty hefty stock of baking supplies on hand—flour, butter, sugar, eggs, giant Costco bags of chocolate chips. You know, the essentials. But it’s also important to know how to work around a sparse pantry or fridge…
Slow cooker applesauce
You know that awful feeling when you bite into an apple and it just gives way under your teeth? No matter how perfect that red delicious in your box lunch looks, its mealy insides never live up to your dreams…
Why do apples turn pink?
JS (my boyfriend) and I headed way out of the city last week, passing several barn sales and too many water towers to count on our way to the ultimate fall experience: apple picking. The grounds were lovely and the…
Kidney bean poisoning
You hear about poisonous mushrooms and berries and all that jazz, but kidney beans? Yes, as it turns out. Raw kidney beans contain very high levels of phytohaemagglutinin, a protein that wreaks havoc on cell walls and cell metabolism. But…
