Examines the biochemistry behind cooking and food preparation, rejecting such common notions as that searing meat seals in juices and that cutting lettuce causes it to brown faster

A requisite countertop companion for all home chefs, Keys to Good Cooking distils the modern scientific understanding of cooking and translates it into immediately useful information. The book provides simple statements of fact and advice, along with brief explanations that help cooks understand why, and apply that understanding to other situations. Not a cookbook, Keys to Good Cooking is, simply put, a book about how to cook well. A work of astounding scholarship and originality, this is a concise and authoritative guide designed to help home cooks navigate the ever-expanding universe of recipes and ingredients and appliances, and arrive at the promised land of a satisfying dish.

This engaging and approachable (and humorous!) guide to taste and flavor will make you a more skilled and confident home cook How to Taste outlines the underlying principles of taste, and then takes a deep dive into salt, acid, bitter, sweet, fat, umami, bite (heat), aromatics, and texture. You'll find out how temperature impacts your enjoyment of the dishes you make as does color, alcohol, and more. The handbook goes beyond telling home cooks what ingredients go well together or explaining cooking ratios. You'll learn how to adjust a dish that's too salty or too acidic and how to determine when something might be lacking. It also includes recipes and simple kitchen experiments that illustrate the importance of salt in a dish, or identifies whether you're a "supertaster" or not. Each recipe and experiment highlights the chapter's main lesson. How to Taste will ultimately help you feel confident about why and how various components of a dish are used to create balance, harmony, and deliciousness.

A hiking and exploring guidebook to Orgeon's Columbia River Gorge. Features day hikes, waterfalls, scenic wonders, and must-see attractions.

Along with gorgeous renditions of raw ingredients, readers will discover descriptions and a list of all the ways to prepare them.

The ultimate guide to the smells of the universe – the ambrosial to the malodorous, and everything in between – from the author of the acclaimed culinary guides On Food and Cooking and Keys to Good Cooking From Harold McGee, James Beard Award-winning author and leading expert on the science of food and cooking, comes an extensive exploration of the long-overlooked world of smell. In Nose Dive, McGee takes us on a sensory adventure, from the sulfurous nascent earth more than four billion years ago, to the fruit-filled Tian Shan mountain range north of the Himalayas, to the keyboard of your laptop, where trace notes of phenol and formaldehyde escape between the keys. We'll sniff the ordinary (wet pavement and cut grass) and the extraordinary (ambergris and truffles), the delightful (roses and vanilla) and the challenging (swamplands and durians). We'll smell one another. We'll smell ourselves. Through it all, McGee familiarizes us with the actual bits of matter that we breathe in—the molecules that trigger our perceptions, that prompt the citrusy smells of coriander and beer and the medicinal smells of daffodils and sea urchins. And like everything in the physical world, molecules have histories. Many of the molecules that we smell every day existed long before any creature was around to smell them—before there was even a planet for those creatures to live on. Beginning with the origins of those molecules in interstellar space, McGee moves onward through the smells of our planet, the air and the oceans, the forest and the meadows and the city, all the way to the smells of incense, perfume, wine, and food. Here is a story of the world, of every smell under our collective nose. A work of astounding scholarship and originality, Nose Dive distills the science behind the smells and translates it, as only McGee can, into an accessible and entertaining guide. Incorporating the latest insights of biology and chemistry, and interweaving them with personal observations, he reveals how our sense of smell has the power to expose invisible, intangible details of our material world and trigger in us feelings that are the very essence of being alive.

Incredible Paleo Meals Don’t Have to Be a Labor of Love Amanda Torres, author of Latin American Paleo Cooking and founder of The Curious Coconut, simplifies the Paleo diet with these quick and delicious gluten- and dairy-free recipes. This mouthwatering collection will help you conquer Paleo cooking any day of the week. Her recipes focus on what Paleo should be—a variety of colorful vegetables and fresh meats. No finicky or extravagant Paleo-ified replacement meals, no hard-to-find specialty ingredients, no special occasion treat recipes—just the backbone of a healthy, wholesome, nutrient-dense diet. This book teaches you how to cook a ton of commonly available vegetables in a way that you and your family will actually want to eat (and ask for seconds). Amanda’s cooking isn’t “good for being Paleo,” it’s good food, period. Helpful charts also pair side dishes with mains that have similar cooking times and preparation methods, so you can batch cook and make a whole meal, all at once, using only your stove—no other appliances needed. Making healthy, tasty meals just got a whole lot easier (and faster) thanks to this much-needed guide to simple and vibrant Paleo cooking.

In this book, Harold McGee applies the scientific method to his activities with pots and pans, examining many common foods and cooking methods.

"Most recipes are AIP-friendly or AIP-adaptable"--Cover.

Presents a series of techniques and tips for solving common kitchen problems in preparing and serving meats, fruits, vegetables, spices, and condiments.