McGee on Food science
This monster of a book comes in at 884 pages and it’s all about food & science - for instance why eggs go hard when they’re cooked and why fruit goes brown when chopped. I got it after reading an interview with Heston Blumenthal where he says that he became fascinated with the science of cooking after reading this book, and naturally started to experiment.
July 30th, 2006 at 10:09 pm
[…] I’ve been learning all about egg foams from the McGee book. The most famous egg foam is meringue, made with egg whites, but it is also possible (and harder) to foam egg yokes, making both zabaglione and sabayon. So when Ramsey made this recipe a few weeks ago I was interested and I tried to reproduce it. The base for this is red grapefruits and oranges, cut into segments: The sabayon is made with four egg yokes, icing sugar and (in my case) really cheap and horrible Asti Spumante, but one is supposed to use pink champagne. I beat it for 10 minutes over a simmering pan of water, and then beat it for another 5 minutes or so until it was cool: After N-sama and I agreed that the sour fruits did not go well with the sweet sabayon. It’d go better with a pear, or even with ice cream. […]
October 18th, 2006 at 9:30 pm
[…] I watched Channel 4’s “Cooking It” yesterday, featuring Jun Tanaka, a cooking teacher. He’s obviously not read his McGee because he would otherwise have known that meat is not cooked on the outside to “seal it”, so I had my serious doubts about this and other things he said. Anyhow, Jun’s mission is to get people cooking haute cuisine food, and so I set upon his recipe for Fillet of Beef cooked in a Herbed Salt Crust. I’ve wanted to make a “salt crust” for beef for a while: […]