Food Geek

My latest apolitical obsession is molecular gastronomy or as I like to call it, food geekiness. I’ve enjoyed cooking for a while, but it wasn’t until a week and a half ago that I found out (via NPR) that I hadn’t even heard of the bible of food science, Harold McGee’s “On Food and Cooking : The Science and Lore of the Kitchen”. Since I picked up the book, I haven’t been able to put it down. One of my favorite bits so far has been this little sidebar in the section on soy products :

The Delightful Physics of Miso Soup

Miso soup is one of the most common Japanese dishes. It typically includes a dashi broth (p. 238) and small cubes of tofu. As is true of many Japanese preparations, miso soup is a delight to the eye as well as the palate. When the soup is made and poured into the bowl, the miso particles disperse throughout in an even haze. But left undisturbed for a few minutes, the particles gather around the center of the bowl in discrete little clouds that slowly change shape. The clouds mark convection cells, columns in the broth where hot liquid from the bowl bottom rises, is made cooler and so more dense by evaporation at the surface, falls again; is reheated and becomes less dense, rises, and so on. Miso soup enacts at the table the same process that produces towering thinderhead clouds in the summer sky.

So far, the rest of the book isn’t nearly as precious as the section above, but it’s a damn good read. Highly recommended.


posted by greg on August 21, 2006 @ 12:33 pm

5 comments »

  1. Hope to do Fuji’s soon!

    Comment by Erin — August 21, 2006 @ 1:30 pm

  2. Two other great books that have a mixture of the science behind the art of cooking and baking are ‘Cookwise’ by Shirley O. Corriher and ‘I’m Just Here for the Food’ by Alton Brown. A third, but less engaging one, is ‘How to Read a French Fry’. Joana found the first two helped immensely in understanding the physics and chemistry behind cooking.

    Comment by Forkboy — August 22, 2006 @ 5:25 am

  3. I second the recommendation of Cookwise, and I believe a companion, Bakewise, is supposed to be due out sometime soon. Corriher also appeared in a lot of Alton Brown’s “Good Eats” segments to explain the chemistry behind the cooking.

    Comment by hooboy — August 22, 2006 @ 8:54 am

  4. Cookwise is next in my list of food books. I’ve got Alton Brown’s book on kitchen gear and I’m a big fan of Good Eats, but I wanna sample a few other authors before picking up his two other books. Have any of you read What Einstein Told His Cook? It seems like it might be a good light read.

    Comment by greg — August 22, 2006 @ 2:47 pm

  5. That’s not one I’m familiar with, gonna look into it.

    Comment by hooboy — August 23, 2006 @ 2:29 pm

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