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Are eggs bad for science?
The primary aim of this blog is to become a better home cook by learning some of the science of cooking. But I do have a secondary aim and that is to occasionally talk about how science works in the context of food science. This week is the first week I’ve really focused on how Continue reading
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Quick bite: A cooks tour of fats and oils, the good, the bad and the ugly
In my last post on emulsions I was a pretty loose with my terminology when referring to fats, oils, lipids, cholesterol etc. In this Quick Bite I just want to explain some of the terminology and start getting a bit more precise about what I mean when I say ‘fat’ (or an oil which is Continue reading
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Mastering the science of sugar: From simple syrups to caramel
I’ve been catching up on the latest series of the Great British Bake Off and in one episode, amongst all the usual drama of collapsing pastries and sagging cakes, the contestants were overcooking their caramel for the Banoffee Pie technical and it made me think about sugar. In recent posts I’ve talked a lot about Continue reading
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Hurts so good: The painful pleasure of chillies
When I was running a medical research laboratory I was part of long running research project in Issan province in the north-eastern part of Thailand. One of the perks of working on this project was frequent trips to Thailand to work with Thai and American colleagues. My first visits were close to twenty years ago 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
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Quick bite: A cooks tour of protein chemistry
If you have read any of the posts on this blog you are probably starting to realise that when we are talking about chemistry in cooking a lot of the time we are actually talking about proteins. For this reason it is important that we have a clear idea of what a protein is, how Continue reading
The Science of Food 