COOKING With A Touch of Science

Cooking with a Touch of Science watchfully enables the cook to extend his or her culinary limits by explaining why certain steps and procedures are critical to producing a delicious meal, nurturing all around better cooking skills while introducing a selection of recipes sure to impress. Above all, this is a cookbook of favorite gourmet recipes, enhanced with insightful scientific explanations and valuable cooking tips. It contains 84 recipes, covering a wide range of foods from tender pancakes to roasts and stews, heavenly lasagna, savory cheese-and-cream-flavored fish-in-a-ramekin, exotica such as Lobster Thermidor, Beef Wellington, unusual foreign specialties, and tasty sauces that will turn any entrée into a memorable feast. Recipes have been prepared and tested thoroughly by the author, George Brewer (PhD) over three decades. They are enlivened with stories of their origins and imaginative serving suggestions and are presented in an easy-to-read fashion. Special sections discuss in detail the best way to roast a turkey or cook a beef roast, with a well-tested primer on optimizing cooking time -- that most critical part of the cooking cycle -- to assure the best tasting, most tender and juicy meat. The detailed data from extensive cooking tests, providing specific cooking times for roasts and turkeys according to their shape and weight, form unique contributions to the art of preparing delicious food. For example, the conventional use of a numerical parameter- 'minutes/pound'- to estimate cooking times is shown to be not applicable to prime-rib class cuts of beef (including rib-eye and tenderloin roasts); this book offers a substitute procedure. In addition to four chapters that provide recipes for specific foods, a full chapter is devoted specifically to sauces, including explanations of the complexity and techniques of preparing sauces -- described by Julia Child as "The splendor and glory of ...cooking!" The text is supplemented throughout by footnotes that provide details to assure ease of successful preparation. Cooking tips presented in Dr. Brewer's book alone are worth the space on your bookshelf. The tutorial discussions on food preparation will be helpful when preparing recipes from other sources. In other words, this book is different from many gourmet cookbooks and books about the science of cooking in that it applies just a bit of science to enhance the cook's understanding of cooking processes and procedures so that tastier foods might find their way onto the dining table. Enjoy!
About the Author: George Brewer is a scientist with a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering. His 30 year professional career was spent with the Research Laboratories of the Hughes Aircraft Company in research and development of microwave electron tubes, electron beam generation and focusing, and ion propulsion for spacecraft. He has contributed to or authored several books on electron dynamics and ion propulsion plus 27 technical papers published in recognized journals. He was also elected as a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. What has all this to do with cooking? Now retired, Dr. Brewer applies his scientific mind to the art of cooking. He has been collecting and perfecting recipes for his family and friends for over three decades, and now presents the best of them for the public to enjoy. Perfecting has entailed taking copious notes and generating graphs and diagrams that document, for example, how heat penetrates and is distributed throughout a beef roast or turkey - very differently as we learn in this book due to their specific shapes and proportions. His daughters recall him photo-copying cross-sections of French bread that he'd baked in order to record the density of sought-after air holes. Dr. Brewer has also enjoyed world-wide travel and sampled fine cuisine throughout Europe, North America and Asia. He collected recipes from his favorite restaurants, and consulted cooking luminaries Julie Child and Harold McGee's works. He would then go home to test and re-test the recipes until the desired effect was attained. He shares these valuable lessons-learned and cooking tips in 289 footnotes, numerous references and quotes from his culinary mentors. Above all, Dr. Brewer aims to bring fine dining into every home. Many of the recipes hint at short cuts; for example, cutting preparation time by substituting a tested ready-made brand of tomato sauce. Step by step instructions carefully lead the reader through each recipe, with extra attention to the more delicate tasks such as thickening sauce to avoid those dreaded lumps. The all-important Sauces chapter occupies 50 pages of the entire 220 page book! Written in an easy narrative with personal vignettes on nearly every page, this book is a delight to read even if no teaspoon is leveled or roux is whisked. Enjoy learning about the physics of energy exchange and the behavior of collagen in a way that illuminates why careful cooking is so important, and then how to do it. Bon Appetit!