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 use of yeast gives baked goods (such as breads) both flavor and an airy lightness. Unlike chemical leaveners which react upon contact to produce gases, yeast are living organisms that digest sugars and produce alcohol and carbon dioxide. Because they are living, we promote their growth and their production by providing them with warmth, food (sugars), and time. Yeast is used for a variety of purposes outside of baking (such as for brewing beer, for fermenting wine, and for ingesting as a nutritional supplement) but we'll focus on yeast for baking in this article.

What do professional cooks use to form the base of many flavorful sauces, while many home cooks simply discard and wash down the drain? The answer is fond. How could two groups of people treat the same thing so differently: one as a bother, the other as a boon? A little culinary knowledge is all it takes to incorporate the wonderful substance that is fond into all your home cooking.

Christopher Allen describes himself as "an archaeologist of flavor". He relentlessly digs deep to discover the missing ingredient to make his dishes Smithsonian-worthy.