May 25, 2004

culinary hacker

The June issue of Wired has a feature article on Alton Brown, my favorite TV food show person. I'm sure it will magically appear on their site microseconds after I post this, but for now, I can only find it in the print edition. He talks about cooking from a scientific perspective, breaking down and amplifying classic recipes with knowledge of the exact temperature that bread browns, understanding the thermodynamics behind quick thawing, and discovering that beating egg whites in a copper bowl makes the egg and copper molecules bond into copper-conalbumin, creating greater stability and more volume.

We've set our Tivo to record every episode of Good Eats at "basic" quality so that we can have a digitally demonstrated cookbook of sorts. With our expanded Tivo... sixty episodes only take up 10% of our hard drive space. (ha ha ha!) Lydia swooned when I made Alton's recipe for french toast last Saturday... subbing lactose-free milk for the cream. Anyone know where we can get lactose-free butter and half and half?

1 comment:

John Watts said...

So far, I've been able to master omelet zen, crepe expectations, fried plantains, and banana ice cream. Some ideas I have to pass on, such as pickled beets, but others make a lot of sense. All the recipies are available on the Food Network's website ( http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/show_ea ). If a show is not listed on recent episodes, you can search their recipies and look for Alton Brown. I never knew that there was such a thing as Kosher salt before watching Good Eats. I might have to buy some to try making better pork loins... but that's another show...