Cooking For Geeks

jsuda writes "You've got to have a lot of confidence and nerve to write and try to sell a nearly 400 page book on cooking to the take-out pizza and cola set. No cookbook is likely to turn many geeks into chefs or take them away from their computer screens. However, even though Cooking for Geeks contains a large number of recipes, it is not a conventional cookbook but a scientific explanation of the how and why of cooking which will certainly appeal to that group, as well as to cooking professionals and intellectually curious others." Read on for the rest of jsuda's review. Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food author Jeff Potter pages 432 publisher O'Reilly Media rating 9/10 reviewer jsuda ISBN 0596805888 summary an excellent and intriguing resource for anyone who wants to experiment with cooking The author is a geek himself and brings "geek-like" approaches to the subject matter - deep intellectual curiosity, affinity for details, appreciation of problem solving and hacking, scientific method, and a love of technology. What is even better is his filtering of cooking concepts by a computer coder's framework, analogizing recipes to executable code, viewing of ingredients as inputs and as variables, running processes over and over in a logical manner to test and improve outcomes. This is not a mere literary shoe-horning of cooking concepts into a coder's framework but an ingenuous approach to the topics that should loudly resonate with geeks.

The subject matter includes selecting and using kitchen and cooking hardware; prepping inventory; calibrating equipment (especially your oven, using sugar); understanding tastes and smells; the fundamental difference between cooking and baking (and the personality types which gravitate to one form or the other); the importance of gluten and the three major types of leavening (biological, chemical, and mechanical); the types of cooking; using time and temperatures; how to use air as a tool; the chemistry of food combinations; and very thorough and detailed discussions of food handling and safety. The book is organized into seven chapters and includes an appendix dealing with cooking for people with allergies. The recipes are indexed in the front of the book.

The major conventional flavor types of salt, sugar, acids, and alcohol have been supplemented by modern industrial elements - E- Numbered (a Dewey decimal system-like index) additives, colloids, gels, foams, and other yummy things! All are itemized, charted, and explained in the chapter entitled "Playing with Chemistry." A whole chapter (and an interview with mathematician, Douglas Baldwin) is devoted to the latest and greatest food preparation technique - sous vide - cooking food in a temperature-controlled water bath.

Threaded through the sections are short sidebar interviews of mostly computer and techie types who are serious cooks or involved in the food industry. Some of these contributors are Adam Savage (of Myth Busters fame) on scientific technique, Tim O'Reilly (CEO of the book's publisher) on scones and jam, Nathan Myhrvold, on Moderist cuisine, and others. Other interviews deal with taste sensitivities, food mysteries, industrial hardware, pastry chef insights, and many more. There is an insightful section just on knives and how to use and care for them.

Anyone who is interested in cooking will learn from this book. I now pay attention to things I've never heard of before: browning methods like caramelization and the Maillard processes, savory as a major taste, transglutaminase (a.k.a. meat glue), for example. There is stuff I didn't really want to know - "if you've eaten fish you've eaten worms."

Although one of the strengths of the book is the systematic organization, there are useful tips spread throughout. For example, keeping a pizza stone permanently in your oven will help even out heat distribution; storing vegetables correctly requires knowing whether they admit ethylene gas or not (a chart is included); you can test your smell sensitivity profile by using a professional scratch and sniff test kit obtainable from the University of Pennsylvania. Whatever specialized information not contained in the book is referenced to external sources, especially on the Internet.

If all of this is not stimulus enough for the geek crowd, how about learning how you can spectacularly kill yourself cooking with dry ice, liquid nitrogen, blowtorches, and especially an electrocuted hotdog. Cool! This is mad scientist stuff. Engineering-minded types can learn how to make their own ice cream machine from Legos. You'll also learn how NOT to kill your guests with bacteria and other toxins.

The production is nicely done with easily readable text, plentiful drawings and charts, color captions, and many other quality production features. Weights are based in both grams and US volume-based measurements.

You can purchase Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Cooking for Engineers

[QuietLagoon]

A site in a similar vein.

Re:Cooking for Engineers

[0100010001010011]

One that shops at American stores. I'm an engineer. I do almost everything in metric, at work everything is in metric.

But butter is still sold in 1/2 cup sticks. Milk is still sold in gallons, cans of stuff are usually in floz.

Same with building stuff for my house: 2x4s are 6 or 8' long.

It's just easier to leave it in the units that it comes in.

Re:Cooking for Engineers

[cayenne8]

Yup...if you're from the US, cooking metric just isn't something easily done.

For instance, I can easily measure in my hand a tsp or TBSP of something, I can pour about a cup of liquid easily, but I have no notion in my head what I'd try to measure if I did something in grams, or other metric units.

Don't even get me started in trying to tackle the concept of heat and cooking times in C vs F.

That being said...I think the most valuable new recipe book would be one that actually emphasized and re-enforced what actual PORTION size is supposed to be?!?!

I'm in the middle of working out, losing weight (down 30lbs...working on about 25lbs more)...and aside from moving away from processed foods and carbs, learning portion control has been a true eye opener!!

For instance, a portion of beef, let's say a steak is only 4oz. Do you have any real idea how small that is?

I didn't until I weighed it...and then, I had to weigh it about 3 more times as that I could not believe a bit of meat that small was what is supposed to be a normal portion of your meal. About the size of a deck of cards.

Well, I've been weighing foods to get that picture in my head what a portion is supposed to be. I've been trying to eat meals about 4-5 times a day..and that keeps from getting overly hungry, but man, it takes a little work to get used to eating such a small amount.

In the past, for lunch, I'd have a HUGE tupperware thing filled with spaghetti and soaked in red gravy and meat sauce. I'd have to guess I was easily eating 3-4 lbs of that for a single lunch portion.

Anyway...talk about an eye opener. I think if we could re-enforce what a true portion of food at a meal was, we'd go a LONG way to overcoming obesity.

Fortunately, I found that by increasing the % of protein and fat in my diet and doing practically away with junk carbs (I try to only get them from veggies and fruit and some whole grain products)...my appetite did naturally fade away to a more normal level. That and eating throughout the day helps you to not get voraciously hungry, and want to over eat portions.

Re:Cooking for Engineers

[PaladinAlpha]

As someone who has recently went on a (self-inflicted) diet and exercise program, I want to chime in that this is pretty much right on the money. Pretty much the most important thing is getting your meal count up and your portion size down. Your body only has about five hundred calories of L2 cache, and topping that means your metabolism is having to go to main memory, which is something you want to avoid.

Cooking for computer scientists

[spiffmastercow]

The microwave is usually the optimal algorithm, as it cooks food in logN time.

List geek cooking instructions here

[Anonymous Coward]

Preparing Scrambled Eggs:
INSERT INTO bowl SELECT * FROM spoon_and_raw_eggs ORDER BY RAND()

Making pulled barbecue from a slow cooked slab of beef:
fork(); fork(); fork(); fork(); fork(); fork(); fork(); fork(); fork(); fork(); fork(); fork(); fork();

I'm outta material :(

Complexity

[pjt33]

If you want to cook food in log time you should use an open fire.

Cook's Illustrated, America's Test Kitchen

[spun]

Any geek who aspires to cook good food would do well to read the magazine, Cook's Illustrated and watch the PBS series America's Test Kitchen, that puts out the magazine. This is a nonprofit foundation, the magazine has no ads, like Consumer Reports. They perform scientific experiments on recipes. In a typical article, they will find a classic recipe, analyze the many variations, and explain what commonly goes wrong. They will then attempt to correct the flaws, turning to their food scientists for explanations of things like the Maillard reaction and why adding veal makes a meatloaf jucier (it's the gelatin in veal forming a matrix that keeps water from escaping.) They also perform unbiased reviews of equipment that will let you know, for instance, which cheap nonstick skillet outperforms all the expensive ones.

I've found the scientific approach helpful in my own cooking, not just when recreating the recipes given. Once you know how the Maillard reaction works, for instance, you know why searing meat first and then finishing is not as good as starting at a low temperature and finishing at a high one. Once you understand why Brassicas respond well to a high, dry heat you will never boil brussel sprouts or cauliflower again.

Boolean Stoves

[infinite9]

When my wife and I first got married, she was an awful cook. I mean, it was really bad, like she was trying to kill me and collect the life insurance. So one night, I analyzed her cooking technique. I discovered that for her, the stove was a boolean device. That is, it was either on (10) or off (0). All those numbers in between 0 and 10 were there for decoration. Luckily my wife was really smart, getting As in organic chemistry for example. So i started speaking a different language.

Cooking is all about heat transfer. Heat will conduct from the outside of food to the inside of food (microwaves aside) at the same rate, depending on the substance. If you turn the heat up, it won't simply cook faster. The outside will burn before enough heat has transferred to the inside. This was enough for her to have an epiphany, suddenly realizing what all those numbers between 0 and 10 were for.