Category molecular gastronomy

Hydrocolloid recipe collection v.2

Texture – A hydrocolloid recipe collection It’s a pleasure for me to announce that an updated version of the hydrocolloid recipe collection is available for free download as a pdf file (73 pages, 1.8 Mb). What’s new? Several new recipes…

10 elements of basic kitchen knowledge

Salt in oil. According to Pierre Gagnaire, this is Hervé This’ main discovery. It allows him to sprinkle salt on dishes without the salt dissolving in water from the dish. Thereby the “crunch” of the salt is retained. Rob Mifsud,…

Help needed with densities of hydrocolloids

Photo by Mel B via flickr.com (CC). Measuring powders by volume has serious limitations (more on this later in an up-coming post), but one great advantage is that for small quantities going by volume can sometimes be more accurate than…

Ice cubes and air bubbles

Ice cubes are used both to cool drinks, but also to significantly impact the flavour of certain drinks. No matter your motivation, you should never use “old” ice cubes which have been sitting in your freezer for a while. Why?…

The Big Fat Duck Cookbook

I recently blogged about the Alinea cookbook, and then in a Q&A with both Grant Achatz and Heston Blumenthal I discovered that there is another great cook book coming up this fall: The Big Fat Duck Cookbook! It’s quite amazing…

Osmosis in the kitchen

Lettuce should be fresh and crisp but upon storage water will eventually evaporate. The pressure inside the cells drops and the leaves shrink and become less appetizing. The simple yet effective remedy is to immerse the lettuce leaves in plain,…

The science of BBQ

Photo by spielzimmer via flickr.com (CC). Eric Devlin over at Home of BBQ interviewed me via email about BBQ and molecular gastronomy. The topic should be of interest to the readers of Khymos as well, so I post the questions…

Kitchen chemistry is changing the world

A recent cover feature of Time magazine was “10 Ideas That Are Changing The World”. According to journalist Joel Stein ” ideas are the secret power that this planet runs on”, and guess what? Idea #5 is Kitchen Chemistry. Some…

Alinea cookbook

For more than a decade Ferran Adriá has allowed us to take part in the creative process through the magnificent El Bulli books. And now – finally – we will have the opportunity to look behind the curtains in another…