Your Kitchen is a Lab! No, Not For Meth.

A while ago, the good folks over at Science Friday let me in on a great cookbook called The Science of Good Cooking that combines chemistry and biology with practical cooking advice. I love to cook, but a quick page through this book showed me that any self-esteem where cooking is concerned is totally unfounded.

Titrations still haunt my nightmares.

At heart, though, it's just a cookbook full of those little in-depth fact boxes you find in science textbooks, if they were fun to read any other time than when you have actual test material to study. The dedicated scientists of America's Test Kitchen perform legit experiments on variations of popular recipes for you, so you don't have to dig through Paula Dean and Food Network websites yourself. If you're too cheap to buy a cookbook, which you probably are if you fall into the demographic that reads this blog (the book was an awesome gift from my father), give a listen to the Science Friday interview with the authors. They'll tell you why your crappy plastic cooking bowls mess up your eggs, why olive oil smokes up your kitchen like a Phish concert, and why Tesco isn't the only problem with store-bought ground beef. How do they do all of this? Science, bitches. Sweet, savory science. Below are a couple of pages from the book that convinced me to buy a cheap slow cooker and make the honest-to-god worst Cajun food I have ever tasted. That has nothing to do with the book, though. "Make it up as you go" only works for various fried things, apparently. Also, water and more chicken are not a substitute for chicken broth. The meat was tender, though, so at least a certain book knew what it was doing.

"Wanna know why your meat could be used to build suspension bridges? Buzz saws. You melted the angry enzyme buzz saws of doom, and now your proteins are like ramen noodles. You should be ashamed of yourself." Verbatim.