cuisine

If you're concerned about the number of foods you eat that contain pulverized insect bodies, or worry about all the ways another Coke or Pepsi might contribute to your early demise, boy, have I got an app for you.

The folks at the Center for Science in the Public Interest are wagering you're willing to fork over a buck to find out how truly disgusting and/or dangerous the ingredients in your food are with their new "Chemical Cuisine" app. Download it for 99 cents for iOS or Android and you have instant access to an encyclopedia of all those indecipherable ingredients on food labels--things like cochineal extract or carmine, which comes from those unfortunate aforementioned insects and is used to add a nice pink, purple, or reddish hue to your yogurt and other munchies.… Read more

When you write about Nathan Myhrvold, it's kind of hard to keep it short. Perhaps best known as Microsoft's first CTO, he's also worked with Stephen Hawking, been involved in thousands of patents, zapped mosquitoes with lasers, won awards as a wildlife photographer, and now, published a massive cookbook that attempts to fuse the worlds of the geek and the gastronome.

As it turns out, Myhrvold himself doesn't keep it short, either. His new culinary effort, "Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking," is a six-volume, 2,400-page, 50-plus-pound declaration of a paradigm shift in the world of food.

The stated goal of the ambitious book is nothing less than "reinventing cooking" by looking at cuisine through the lenses of science and innovation (ever wondered how to use electric fields to kill wine bacteria?), while not leaving out all the recipes and techniques you expect in a cookbook.

Some of the methods and recipes outlined in "Modernist Cuisine" aren't going to be too accessible to the average weekend chef, however. Myhrvold and his team borrowed as much from the lab as from the kitchen, using tools like homogenizers and centrifuges, and ingredients such as hydrocolloids and enzymes, to formulate recipes for everything from "Astronaut Ramen" to "Monkfish with Mediterranean Flavors."

In other words, the message is about quality, not quickness, as with so many modern recipes for the harried cook.

Just take this little bit of description from Myhrvold's approach to the ultimate cheeseburger (from the video below of an interview with a local Seattle TV show):

"We infuse smoke flavor into the lettuce; we make a special cheese slice. When the cheese melts, it doesn't separate out and get greasy. We grind the meat in a particular way so that we align all the grains of meat; we cook it in a very specific way using liquid nitrogen..." … Read more

How vigorously do you scrub your fruits and vegetables when you bring them home from the supermarket? Even if you're buying organic, local fruits and veggies directly from the farm, are you sure no one else's grubby hands were all over them an hour ago?

Food-borne disease is a real threat, and harmful bacteria could be lurking on your fruits and vegetables. Is there anything you can do? Well, yes, according to the makers of Cuisine-Clean.

The Cuisine-Clean machine deep cleans and removes harmful pesticides, as well as E. coli, salmonella, listeria giardia, and cryptosporidium from your food … Read more

The kitchen is the one room in the house that benefits most from organization. When you're cooking in high gear, grabbing ingredients and utensils at a fast pace, you find the things you need and move on to the next step. A break in the chain can cause the whole recipe to collapse. To that end, we outfit our kitchens with gadgets and appliances designed to suit our needs. However in order to accomplish anything in the kitchen we must first have the space to work.

The Catskill Cuisine Cart Deluxe with Back-Splash and Galley is a perfect example … Read more

For generations, the kitchen was the focal point of any domicile. Friends and family would gather 'round and relax, share tales, perhaps even help out with the cooking.

While the kitchen is certainly still a major destination in any home, it evolved away from social interaction as living room entertainment exploded. Understanding the trend, conceptual kitchens now integrate screens, monitors, and interactive features into their designs. The advancement of technology has certainly made for some interesting concepts, but there is at least one more thing besides community to consider about the kitchen of tomorrow: the environment.

The Green Cuisine kitchen … Read more

With Thanksgiving only two days away, people are bringing out their favorite recipes for turkey, gravy, stuffing, and pumpkin pie. How do you keep your recipes from year to year? My father's method was to put his favorite recipes into notebooks that would be brought out every year. But even with laminated pages, eventually his notebooks got pretty messy. My mother used index cards to store recipes, but over time the ingredients would fade, especially if the recipe was popular with the family.

In the search for a better method through software, I discovered some good recipe database programs anyone can use. These handy apps let you store all your favorite Thanksgiving recipes (along with all your other recipes) in a searchable database which you can quickly print out for easy access in the kitchen. You can also catalog things like spices and ingredients on hand, and then search for results using those and other parameters. Some of these apps let you explore other databases online with countless recipe variations and varieties of foods to choose from.… Read more