Cooking For Engineers®

Recently, I received a wireless thermometer from Thermoworks to try out. Their newest product is called Smoke and is specifically designed to help people barbecue and smoke food at home. Smoke has two parts - a base unit (which takes two of Thermoworks standardized Pro-Series probes) and a wireless receiver unit - which lets the user track the air temperature and the food temperature without going outside to the smoker.
Thermoworks is selling the Smoke at $99 and this would definitely welcome tool for anyone who likes to slow cook food outside.

These days when I reach for a spatula to turn food in a pan, I've been finding myself grabbing the GastroMax Slotted Turner more often than not. Tina bought this spatula for me after months (or maybe years) of listening to me complain about our various spatulas. After buying the GastroMax Turner, my complaining has stopped.

The baguette is at once the simplest of breads and the most difficult to perfect. It is the most demanding test of a bread baker's skill. In recent years the secrets of professional bakers have been drifting out to the general population of amateur bakers. Techniques can be gleaned from variety of sources. Bread baking cookbooks today do more then provide recipes; they explore and explain the process. Bread baking courses for amateurs are becoming more popular at professional cooking schools and even being offered by some bakeries. Articles appear in magazine and newspapers with a different take on some aspect of the process. This article will attempt to distill this wealth of information to present the techniques required to produce a professional looking and tasting baguette.

In October 2005, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service banned the importing of Beluga caviar from the Black Sea basin. This ban, along with a ban in September 2005 of Beluga caviar from the Caspian Sea, effectively cuts off the supply of Beluga caviar to the United States. Then, in January 2006, the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) temporarily banned the international trade of beluga caviar. These decisions were reached in an attempt to help conserve the dwindling population of Beluga sturgeon, an endangered species. In this article, we examine some of the different kinds of caviar and examine some of the issues surrounding this luxury food.