Are you the innovative type, the cook who marches to a different drummer – used to expressing your creativity instead of just following recipes? Are you interested in the science behind what happens to food while it’s cooking?
Then Cooking for Geeks (O’Reilly Media) is for you.
More than just a cookbook, Cooking for Geeks applies your curiosity to discovery, inspiration, and invention in the kitchen. Why is medium-rare steak so popular? Why do we bake some things at 350°F/175°C and others at 375°F/190°C? And how quickly does a pizza cook if we overclock an oven to 1,000°F/540°C? Author and cooking geek Jeff Potter (@cookingforgeeks) provides the answers and offers a unique take on recipes – from the sweet (a “mean” chocolate chip cookie) to the savory (duck confit sugo).
“Readers of Cooking for Geeks will be much more comfortable walking into the kitchen, picking up a frying pan, and trying something new after reading the book,” says Potter, who has been cooking since he was a child growing up in California. “Cooking for Geeks shows you how to have fun in the kitchen by blending science with cooking and takes a playful, quirky approach to teaching you how to be a better cook.”
This book will help you:
• Initialize your kitchen and calibrate your tools
• Learn about the important reactions in cooking, such as protein denaturation, Maillard reactions, and caramelization, and how they impact the foods we cook
• Play with your food using hydrocolloids and sous vide cooking
• Gain firsthand insights from interviews with researchers, food scientists, knife experts, chefs, writers, and more, including author Harold McGee, TV personality Adam Savage, chemist Hervé This, and xkcd
“There’s really no book out there like Cooking for Geeks – it’s science textbook meets cookbook, written to appeal to anyone who’s curious about how the details work in the kitchen,” says Potter. “And it’s not just for technical geeks – anyone who wants to do more than just follow a recipe will enjoy the book.”
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