Wolke - What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained

A long with the recent explosion of interest in food and cooking has come a growing desire to understand the chemical and physical principles that determine the properties and behavior of our foods.

This book explains the science behind both the foods themselves and the tools we use to prepare them. Its organization and index have been devised to make it easy to find a particular fact or explanation.

Home cooks and professional chefs not only cook but they must first buy ingredients. Todays technology produces such a baffling variety of food products that many cooking problems begin in the market. I have therefore included discussions of both natural and prepared foods, where they come from, what they are made of, and what the practical consequences may be for the cook and consumer.

Having taught at universities for more years than I care to count, and having spent ten of those years as the founding director of a Faculty Development Office helping faculty members to improve their teaching, I recognize two possible approaches to explaining kitchen science. Ill call them the college method and the experience method.

In the college method, I would write what amounts to a textbook on kitchen science and then bid my students to go out into the world and apply their acquired knowledge to solve practical problems that arise in the future. That approach presumes that all the course content will have been mastered and recalled whenever needed. But both my experience as a teacher and undoubtedly yours as a former student testify to the futility of that approach. (Quick: Who fought in the Battle of Hastings?)

In short, the college method attempts to supply answers before the questions arise, whereas in real life, questions crop up without warning and must be dealt with on the spot.

But what if you didnt have to plow through a lot of science, yet every time you were mystified by something you could ask a scientist to explain that specific problem, no more and no less? While you cant have a scientist (much less an Einstein) always at your elbow, the next best thing might be to have at your disposal a compilation of answers to questions that you yourself might be likely to come up with, along with plain, no-nonsense explanations of whats happening. Thats the experience method. In this book, I have selected well over a hundred questions that have been asked of me by real-life cooks, readers of my Food 101 column in The Washington Post and other newspapers.

In addition to explanations of the underlying science, you will find a number of unusual and imaginative recipes developed by my wife, Marlene Parrish, a food professional. The recipes were specifically designed to illustrate the principles being explained. They may be thought of as a lab course that you can eat.

Each question-and-answer unit is designed to stand by itself. Whether prompted by the table of contents, the index, or a question that pops into your head, you can open the book and read the relevant unit without having had to master a series of earlier concepts.