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Not to mention that under taste-testing the Mr. Coffee performed better...

https://www.cooksillustrated.c...

We get the Skeptical Inquirer - http://www.csicop.org/si/ - "the official journal of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Six times per year Skeptical Inquirer publishes critical scientific evaluations of all manner of controversial and extraordinary claims, including but not limited to paranormal and fringe-science matters, and informed discussion of all relevant issues..."

Also, Cook's Illustrated - http://www.cooksillustrated.com/ - which has some nice "evidence based" cookery with a bit of "Consumer Reports" thrown in. We ignore the note from the publisher each issue which is just crazy talk....

And Consumer Reports - http://www.consumerreports.org/ - their technology reviews are not always as well informed as I would like them to be, but they try to maintain a level of unbiasedness that is quite admirable.

This headline should really be fixed as it fails to differentiate between Cook's Illustrated and the offending Cook's source, the former is often simply called "Cook's" so a more specific headline (in my opinion) is in order.

I wish I hadn't commented, but MOD PARENT UP.

Cook's Illustrated is not cheap, but is amazing. Parent is dead on with everything.
http://www.cooksillustrated.com/

Cook's Illustrated. Sorry, extrans and I didn't check the preview....

It's a "chef's knife." Meat cleavers look like hatchets, and are heavy, thick blades made for cutting through joints. http://www.cooksillustrated.com/equipment/overview.asp?docid=10365

On the one hand, we have a large fraction of the population who are happy with their laptop speakers and 128 kbit mp3s on their ipods with the earbuds that come with them. Let me be the first to say that in many situations that's just fine; I have a cheap pair of earbuds on my mp3/ogg player because I tend to listen to podcasts or music in environments with enough noise that I wouldn't tell the difference.

On the other hand, we have the audiophile crowd. People who spend insane amounts of money on wiring, power source "cleaners", etc. There are plenty of people who can tell and appreciate the difference between a cheap setup and a decent one, but most of us have budgets. As soon as you move beyond the standard offerings at your local Best Buy, you enter the realm of not knowing whether the reviews you're reading are from people with a clue or just "audiophiles" who think they hear a difference.

I know, I know, the best way to judge audio equipment is to listen to it yourself. Of course, you run the risk of falling into the trap of thinking you hear a difference when you couldn't if you were doing a blind test.

What I'd like to see is a reputable, audio-focused location which bases its comparisons on objective criteria. For example, I find that dpreview does a pretty decent job laying out the pros and cons of camera equipment. Cooks Illustrated takes a "test everything" approach to creating recipes and testing equipment. Are either perfect? No, but I trust their results more than reviews I see for audio equipment. Audio is subjective by nature, but so is taste; Cooks Illustrated handles this by having blind tasting panels; it'd be cool to see the same approach for audio equipment. Perhaps something like this already exists, but I haven't come across it.

The best thing you can do is purchase some solid stainless steel cookware (like Allclad) and get one piece of non-stick for cooking eggs.

With this compu-cookware, what happens when you want to finish a dish in the oven?

I would like to see how long this stuff last at 450 degrees.

All this technology will never replace stirring, thermometer, and following directions.

Good stainless steel pans will last longer than you do and will be always reliable.

People will buy the stupidist stuff to "help" them cook, when they should just read a book and practice.

Maybe read cooks illustrated, http://www.cooksillustrated.com/ the best way to learn to cook.

American Iron Magazine because AIM has a good balance of tech, reviews, and custom bikes.

Backpacker provides not only reviews of equipment and hikes, they're now including GPS waypoints with the maps.

"Everything in food is science," Brown says. "The only subjective part is when you eat it."

Exactly, repeat after me "Life is too short to eat crap". Anyone who can follow basic directions can learn to cook. Cooks Illustrated was a huge help in this process for me.

Wrong. "Espresso" is a technique for producing a coffee beverage. It forces hot water under high pressure through tightly-packed grounds. Espresso *does* have more caffeine than brewed coffee, mostly since it is stronger. However, the article appears to be talking about ordinary brewed coffee.

I must agree that "Charbux" coffee is extremely over-roasted. When Cook's Illustrated did a coffee comparison, their tasters didn't like Starbucks. When they had some people that work blending coffees check them out, their opinion was that Starbux beans were higher quality than the others, but they were so burned that the result was just plain ol' nasty. I'd give a reference to the article, but it's subscription-only. It is clearly the nerd's cooking magazine, though.

go here they have great recipes well worth paying for
here

Well, it's not free, but it's worth the money.

Cook's Illustrated selects recipes and exhaustively tests variations to come up with the easiest or best tasting recipe. They investigate why certain varieties of potatoes are good in different recipes, for instance. They'll explain why you should soak fries in ice water before frying them. They'll explain the tricks in getting the meringue right.

If you want recipes with the best results for the effort or you want to learn the underlying theory, Cook's is great. (They also have a PBS show called America's Test Kitchen.)

Cook's Illustrated
They'll cook 50 pounds of tuna in order to perfect the recipe for a perfectly seared crust. Hell, look at one of their head chefs
Then I make my rounds to epicurious and foodtv

do you have any suggestions for other resources that present food and food preparation in the same way?

do you have any suggestions for other resources that present food and food preparation in the same way?

The good folks at Cook's Illustrated did some research into this when they did their basic pasta recipe. The end result is that they found that there were no detectable taste differences between pasta cooked in water coming from the hot water or cold water taps. The hot water does cut a few minutes off the boiling time (like 3-4), so they actually recommended it as a technique. They didn't mention the lead issue discussed in some other posts, but I have a hard time believing that this would be a problem in a house with a reasonably modern plumbing system and water heater.

BTW- like Good Eats, Cook's Illustrated (the magazine, the website and their cookbooks) is an *excellent* geek cooking resource. They employ the scientific method in trying to develop the "Best Recipe" (the title of their main cookbook) for each dish they make. When they attack a recipe, they will research many cookbooks to learn about how something generally is made, and then will experiment with different ingredients, techniques and measurements to find the best outcome, based on the feedback of their tasting lab. Where there is interesting food science to explain, they'll do so, much like Alton. Of course, it's not entertaining like Good Eats is, but you will learn a *lot*, and everything I've made from their recipes has tasted great and been relatively foolproof.

The process the Chris Kimball and the CI folks take is to start with the known recipes for a dish, and distill them into a master recipe using a mix of food science and empirical cooking. How would you describe your approach to science in your cooking? Do you start with what you know about ingredients and build the recipe from the ground up, or do you start with known recipes and tear them down and rebuild as necessary?

If you find this kind of subject interesting I suggest you also check out Cookwise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Cooking by Shirley M. Corriher. It's a similar type of cookbook: heavy on the science of food and cooking, with sample recipes. Ms. Corriher contributes frequently to food magazines like Fine Cooking and Cook's Illustrated. In this month's Fine Cooking she went into gory details on the cause of freezer burn and how to prevent it.

I don't know if Chris Kimball is a computer geek, but his work certainly delves into the science of cooking to answer fundamental kitchen questions, like which starch is best to thicken a fruit pie. (Answer: amylopectin, found in arrowroot and tapioca, which is good to know now that fresh blueberries are cheap and plentiful. God, I love fresh blueberry pie.)

Anyway, my wife and I have several of his books, which are great references to have in the kitchen, and although I haven't used it much, he does have a website. It's advertisement-free, and the product reviews are about as objective as you'll find.

For those interested in giving it a try, you can get a free issue of Cook's Illustrated. I just signed up for the free issue, and I figured I'd give it a try.

I agree. Cooks Illustrated is a wonderful thing to have around the kitchen. I'm in the process of convincing myself to buy their hardbound collections and indices from the years before I subscribed..

My favourite cookbook, by a long shot is The New Canadian Basics Cookbook. The recipes are uniformly excellent and bulletproof. I don't think Canadian tastes differ that much from American tastes. I would imagine it would be just as useful for those south of the border.

I always wondered what the best way to BBQ a steak was, so I bought 50 Kg. of steak, marinated some with oils, some with non-oils, put seasoning on some, and all possible combinations of the above, then grilled each one at 300,325,350,375,400,425 and 450 degrees for 3-19 minutes per side, either turning once, twice, or 2*N times.

The results are presented in the following handy table and graph, with results from our 50 food tasters in 54 categories...

BTW, the magazines are much better than the books that they also publish... The books mostly contain only the final recipe, not the experimental log book that led to it.

The best "general" cookbook I've found is How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. Each chapter starts up with several pages of "how to" and "How to do this right" information (such as how to dice tomatoes without making a mushy mess,) then follows up with tons of recipes.

No pictures but lots of drawings of techniques such as which part of the cow that steak came from... (IIRC, there's also some info on butchering that steak yourself.)

I used to use Encyclopedia Britannica once in a while. But now, I can't use it at all because it's a pay site. I can't justify paying a subscription when I might use it once or twice a month.

I currently pay to subscribe to one on-line content provider : Cooks Illustrated. Its worth it to me. Salon might be worth it to me, too, but I don't buy it. As more and more sites go pay-for-play, I'm not going to be subscribing to dozens of sites. 1) I am only a casual reader, and 2) even if I thought it was worth it, I'm not going to pay hundreds of dollars a month to keep up with all the sites I visit.

And here's where it starts to break down: the (commercial) web can end up just like print media. Sure, any print publication could be subscribed to by everyone, but everyone is not going to subscribe to everything, or even one thing. So you have your subscribers, and you don't reach anyone else.

I know that Salon Premium pretty much drove me away from Salon. I accept that in the future, I will be much more limited web site availability. I'm willing to pay that price because all that casual content isn't worth the thousands of dollars it would cost to maintain subscriptions.

Micropayments, anyone?