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Saffron: The duplicitous golden spice
Humans have always displayed enormous ingenuity when it comes to short-changing their fellow man. Modern tech companies, with their opaque terms of service and relentless data farming, are a great recent example of this but to capture the eternal nature of man’s duplicity we need look no further than our daily repast. Since antiquity we Continue reading
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Fermentation I: Beer and chemistry
I had a long break over Christmas and these are a few of the meals I had during that break: at the local pizza joint a pepperoni pizza washed down with beer, a trip to the German club where I had a pork knuckle with sauerkraut washed down with beer, a trip to a French Continue reading
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Quick bite: The secret life of vegetables
As Harold McGee points out in his book, On Food and Cooking, plants are essentially chemical factories. Plants are famously stationary and lacking any motive power must interact with the external world, for the most part, through a dazzling array of chemicals that they synthesise from basic chemical elements. The same plant will simultaneously produce Continue reading
The Science of Food 