276°
Posted 20 hours ago

McGee on Food and Cooking: An Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture

£22.5£45.00Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

I have used Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking for the last two decades whenever I've had questions on the chemistry of food or to understand some aspect of the cooking process. This is definitely a reference book to be laid open on a table and lovingly dipped into by an enquiring mind.

Plants as common as cabbage, lima beans, potatoes and lettuce have had some of their old wild, natural toxicity bred out of them. The writing is succinct but not tedious to follow, and every chapter packs in a spectrum of interesting facts. Not only does he explain how every culinary reaction works, he also explores the history of everything we eat. The description of what happens when you make mayonnaise definitely helped me avoid getting it wrong for example.

Some chapters look like they'll be exciting, like the chapter on sauce, but it's pretty much a chapter on the chemistry of thickening reagents. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, there are entire pages of historical and scientific context, giving a complete picture of each topic being covered. Good cooking is honest, sincere and simple, and by this I do not mean to imply that you will find in this, or indeed in any other book, the secret of turning out first class food in a few minutes with no trouble.

A goldmine of information about every ingredient and cooking process, answering all the questions you will ever have about food.This is a can't-put-it-down explanation of how cooking, pickling,preserving, fluffing, rising, kneading and all manner of other cooking techniques work. It would be a stretch to say that I am a cook or a 'foodie', but I imagine that every culinary master in America must own this book. This is an invaluable resource when your kids ask "does THIS cheese have mold in it" or "why does it all stick together if you cook it too long" or when you want to know what makes espresso different from coffee. This is the kind of book that will sit next to the stove, dog-eared and grease-spattered, eternally useful, until Personal Chef Robots become fixtures in all of our homes. From Plato’s views on cooking to electron micrographs of cheese to a description of how eggs form in a chicken’s body to the history of beer and chocolate, this book offers an intoxicating wealth of food information, trivia, and science.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment