Previous Page
Food science books are all the rage these days and naturally of particular interest to readers of Cooking For Engineers. The top dog in the library is still Harold McGee's incredible work, On Food and Cooking. Last month another food science book, The Science of Good Food, was published. This new book might be more accessible to the casual curious cook due to its easy language and beautiful layout.
Previous Page
Who knows when future editions (if any) will be published... The "bugs" in the current edition are really mostly nitpicking and me being a definition stickler. The common myths of how to keep onions from making you cry have no excuse however.
That's not nitpicking, that's a pretty big goof, IMO. I may not be an engineer, but I've got about 40 units of University Biological Science courses behind me, so not an untutored reader. In my book, that's a big goof. I read books like these for the details, and if it's new-to-me information, I naturally want it to be correct. I want to use the info I find in a food science book with confidence.
Yeah, this is cholesterol, not a food, as such, but what makes it significant is that cholesterol is such i big bad in the popular mind. People are freakish enough on the subject as it is, without further confusing them and giving them yet another thing to obsess over.
Then you should check out CookWise, ruthie. Shirley Corriher is all about the science.
Then you should check out CookWise, ruthie. Shirley Corriher is all about the science.
I second that recommendation for CookWise. They've finally got a paperback version out and it's available at many Costcos (or was last month). Bakewise is also excellent.
A couple of other books that do a great job on the science of cooking is Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking and Jeff Potter's Cooking for Geeks.
One last recommendation is the seemingly expensive ($450+) Modernist Cuisine which I think is worth every penny. At about $10 a pound, it's cheaper by weight than many other cookbooks and it really is the closest thing we have to the sum total of all current cooking knowledge in the world.