I woke up on Sunday morning with this recipe in my head – not, I am glad to say, being dictated by my subconscious in a dream, but more a natural progression of the fact that I hadn’t slept well…
Category: Food chemistry
Review: McGee on Food and Cooking
My copy of McGee on Food and Cooking arrived yesterday. It was, as I had understood, the revised version. Indeed, it is quite heavily revised, because a lot of things changed in the 20 years between 1984 and 2004. The…
Vegan Marshmallow attempt #2
In the immortal words of 1066 And All That, it’s magnificent, but it’s not the railway station. Which is to say that I did, in fact, succeed in making confectionery this time, and it even tastes good. I just didn’t…
Learning about vegetables
I’m still working my way through McGee On Food and Cooking. Honestly, this book is a treasure trove. I’ve ordered my copy and I can’t wait for it to arrive. At the moment, I’m in the vegetables chapter, which is…
Further exciting chemistry knowledge
Apparently, the reason your skewer comes out clean when the cake is cooked is because in a cooked cake, all the molecules have bound to each other, and therefore have no interest in binding to a random skewer. And I…
Kitchen chemistry again…
I’m probably going to be fairly quiet on my blog this week, because I have my head down reading and learning about the chemistry of food on a molecular level. No, it isn’t molecular gastronomy, it’s a book called On…
Vegan Marshmallows – first attempt
Astute readers may have deduced from the title of this post that my first attempt at making marshmallows using agar instead of gelatine was less than successful. And they would be right. Boy, would they be right. About the only…
Basics that aren’t: Scones
This recipe doesn’t come with pictures, because the first thing you need to know about making scones is that the faster you make them, the better they taste. That means no stopping at every step to take the lens cap…
Recipe: Flavoured Butters
You all knew, didn’t you, that once I had seen Not Quite Nigella’s post on buttermaking, it would only be a matter of time before I had to start fiddling with it? In fact, by the time I got up…
Kitchen Chemistry – Anthocyanins and Blue Food
I’ve just been reading Green Gourmet Giraffe‘s blog post about the difficulties of making genuinely blue food. She’s right, of course – really bright blue food is hard to come by without excessive use of food colouring (though I do…