A blog about food and cooking by Chris Norris
Kindle-izing Cooking For Christmas this year, my lovely wife delivered into my hands a new Kindle! If you don’t recognize the name, a ‘Kindle’ is an electronic reader for books manufactured by Amazon. Basically, you buy a book from Amazon in electronic format, and it […]
Is That Really Pepper? Fresh pepper (along with salt) is one of the easiest, high impact spices you can add to your food. Naturally, I go through a lot of pepper. I own about a half dozen different pepper grinders, each purchased with the dream […]
If you read my series on salt (and I’m sure you, my avid fan base, hungrily consumed each editorial serving) then the concept of ‘umami’ is not foreign. Umami is one of the basic senses of taste, along with sweet, sour, bitter and of course, […]
Sous Vide (pronounced “Sue Veed”) Let’s say you want to cook a largish piece of meat. The traditional approach is to put the meat in a roasting pan or dish and set the temperature according to a recipe or experience. Then set the timer for […]
Salt, Part 9 (final): Don’t Eat Food Without It Salt is an essential mineral that we can’t live without. Salt has an important role in the history of man, and even today is used as a large-scale delivery vehicle for iodine, essentially medicating the entire […]
The Lab Equipment Cooking at home is nothing more than a series of simple chemistry experiments that we conduct in our home lab. We just happen to call our home chemistry lab a kitchen! We use heat, mechanical energy, and chemicals to transform raw ingredients […]
Chemistry in the Kitchen There’s a lot happening on the food front, with equipment and ingredients evolving in directions that aren’t obvious to those of us who cook at home. I’ve talked before about the unusual approaches being used by Charlie Trotter, Wylie Dufresne, Grant […]
Salt, Part 8: To Serve Man The ability of salt to cause water to move across cellular boundaries is at the core of salt cures and other forms of preservation using salt. Salted meats, whether fish, meat or fowl are cured by applying lots of […]
Salt, Part 7: Doctor Salt The concentration of electrolytes in our system must be precisely maintained in order for our bodies to work. Sodium, along with potassium, are two of the most important electrolytes in our body, so not surprisingly our bodies have quite a […]
Salt, Part 6: Please Pass The Salt Salt is one of our five basic senses of taste, which also includes sweet, sour, bitter and umami (savory). Haven’t heard of ‘umami’ before? It’s kind of a recent thing, discovered and named by a Japanese researcher. Umami […]