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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

J. Kenji López-Alt

6 Food Science Books That Will Change the Way You Look at Food

In Austin, where I’m from, barbecue pitmasters debate the Maillard reaction as often as they tuck into a plate of brisket and ribs. In other words, the best chefs have long known that science is the secret to their success, but over the past few years, science has become sexy to regular folks too.

Now you don’t have to go to the Institute of Culinary Education or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to understand all of those chemical reactions that make food taste a certain way, or to learn how to make it taste even better. There are cookbooks for that. Here are a few of my favorites.

On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, by Harold McGee

Written back in 1984, this is a serious food science bible. Every professional chef has a dog-eared copy and can probably recite word for word sections about her favorite ingredient, cooking technique, and science behind why it works. Get ready for an intense discussion at the molecular level, including a chemistry primer.

The Science of Good Cooking, by Cook’s Illustrated

Cook’s Illustrated and America’s Test Kitchen pioneered the idea of cooking with the scientific method in order to develop foolproof recipes (they totally changed the way I make baked potatoes, for example). This easy-to-read book walks you through 50 experiments and more than 400 recipes that will soon become your new favorites.

The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt

Harold McGee has some competition, as J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s new book might just be the bible for a new generation, especially the home cook. His accessible tone, funny anecdotes, and step-by-step photos are the icing on the cake of delicious recipes, developed with the exhaustive scientific method seen in The Science of Good Cooking. I pretty much made all of his Thanksgiving meal suggestions and couldn’t have been happier.

Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters, by Gordon M. Shepherd

If you want to know not only how to make that stuffing for Thanksgiving but also why it tastes so good, this is your jam. Be prepared for a super nerdy analysis of the mechanics of smell as well as how the brain processes flavor in terms of emotion, food preferences, cravings, and memory.

Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson, by IBM and the Institute of Culinary Education

In the 21st century, cooking isn’t limited to humans. A few years ago, IBM teamed up with the Institute of Culinary Education to create a cognitive cooking technology called Chef Watson that could discover new ingredient combinations and recipes that humans would never think of. This book details those recipes (think Hoof-and-Honey Ale), as well as how they did it.

Liquid Intelligence: The Art and Science of the Perfect Cocktail, by Dave Arnold

And where would the best meal be without a good drink to go with it? Dave Arnold has put together more than 120 cocktail recipes using the most cutting-edge techniques and hard-core science, guaranteeing you the knowledge you need to make the most amazing milk-washed vodka cocktail of your life.

Is Solar-Powered Cooking the Next Big Thing?

In his new book The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, J. Kenji López-Alt wants you to use a beer cooler, water, an instant-read thermometer, some Ziploc bags, and a few towels to make a super DIY sous vide. Put it in a sunny spot in your kitchen, he advises, and cook everything from brats and beer to olive oil–poached salmon and rib-eyes with shallots, garlic and thyme. That sure beats spending a couple hundred bucks on a fancy sous vide machine.

It’s clear that Kenji has laboriously tested every recipe and idea in the book, with positive results, so this isn’t a cockamamie hypothesis from a novice but a practiced prescription from a professional. But I still can’t quite get behind the idea of putting raw meat in a cooler with some lukewarm water, setting the whole thing in a warm spot on the kitchen floor, and letting nature take its course.

But it turns out he’s not the only one. While some companies are making super high-tech kitchen devices, others are turning to the lowest-tech possibilities around. For example, GoSun’s line of solar ovens use compound parabolic reflectors and a tubular design to convert almost 80 percent of sunlight that enters the device into useable heat. There’s also a vacuum tube oven involved, and it doesn’t require electricity, gas, or any other man-made fuel to work.

Meanwhile BjornQorn makes solar-popped popcorn using a device they invented themselves: massive mirrored reflectors that collect and focus the sun’s rays, similar to how little kids fry ants with a magnifying glass. The $6 bags are available at hipster-centric specialty stores in the Northeast, and the popcorn has become so popular that Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams even made an ice cream flavor out of it.

And just recently, KinoSol’s solar-powered food dehydrators were fully funded on Kickstarter. The devices use a convection system and zero electricity. The company wants to make domestic dehydrators that will help individual households decrease their food waste by finding another use for those brown bananas or slightly mealy apples: The thought is that once they’re dehydrated, they’ll make a tasty snack.

The idea of an environmentally responsible, low-power way to cook is intriguing and on-trend, as people want to be connected to making their food in every way possible. Also, both KinoSol and BjornQorn have used their devices in third-world countries to bring an easy way of cooking to places that do not have electricity or access to other fuels, and for that reason, they’re invaluable. We believe that over time more and more companies will move into this space. But to be successful with the mainstream tech user, the products themselves need to feel more expensive and offer more than just a low-energy way to cook — they need to prove that cooking this way makes better-tasting or more nutritious food.

 

NY Times Talks Sous Vide (Again)

In 2009, the New York Times published an article about something called sous vide, a cooking technique that had food tinkerers and culinary explorers using lab equipment and other hacks to bring – what up to that point been a pro trick – into the consumer kitchen. Those were early days for the precision cooking method, in part because it was well over a year before Nathan Myhrvold and Chris Young would publish their seminal work, Modernist Cuisine, a five-volume, 50-pound heap of books that helped to kickstart the sous vide revolution.

Flash forward almost seven years and sous vide is back in The Grey Lady, only now the cooking method is on the precipice of becoming mainstream.

One expert cited in the 2009 piece was the same Chris Young, who at the time was the culinary research manager for Intellectual Ventures. In this week’s piece by Times columnist Brian X. Chen, Young doesn’t appear, but his new company, ChefSteps, is featured prominently. That’s because Young and other early evangelists of sous vide have been able to ride the wave of the growing popularity of the cooking method while also helping to fuel its rise through consumer education and consumer friendly sous vide circulators (ChefSteps just released its sous vide circulator called the Joule).

Another cooking wizard at the forefront of the sous vide movement is J. Kenji López-Alt, who went from being an architecture major who started working in restaurants during summer breaks from college to become one of the Internet’s go-to authorities on sous vide. López-Alt writes the popular The Food Lab column for food site Serious Eats, and last year published a NY Times best-selling book by the same name.

In Chen’s article, López-Alt and ChefSteps’ Grant Crilly (who, like Young, is also an Intellectual Ventures/Modernist Cuisine expat) talk about sous vide’s growing popularity, and address what has become the main hurdle to wider adoption of sous vide: long cooking times.

According to López-Alt, using sous vide may take more time, but consumers can adjust if they just spend a little time planning what they want to eat on any given night.

“Most people, when they think about dinner, say, ‘What can I get at the grocery store now and get going tonight?’” he said. “It requires a lot more forethought.”

Crilly makes a similar argument and says the results will be worth it.

“Cook it slow, unlock all that really beautiful flavor, and you’ve got a really nice piece of meat,” he said.

Comparing the two posts shows how far sous vide has come and how far it still has to go. To be sure, sous vide is becoming much more commonplace in the consumer kitchen, but will require a little patience from consumers if it’s ever to go truly mainstream.