It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a person in possession of a quantity of blueberries, must be in want of baked goods [citation needed]. Having acquired blueberries and converted some of them into desserts, we set our sights on things breakfasty, and commenced The Muffinning. Continue reading
Here at the primary testing facility, we recently acquired our first sous vide immersion circulator. Since this is a novel cooking technique for us we have many questions. In this post we seek to find out how important searing really is when cooking steaks?
Here at the primary testing facility, it’s no secret that we like red meat. So, when we found standing rib-roasts on sale shortly before Thanksgiving, we couldn’t resist doing a science to one of them (getting two for control, seemed a bit excessive).
Initial observation:
Roast recipes have always seemed to be a bit of a dark art, with mysterious temperature changes in the middle, cooking times based on mass rather than linear dimensions. These peculiar practices seem to produce delicious results, and presumably have something to do with how heat flows into the meat during cooking. In this post we hope to shed some light on how heat flows through a roast.
When it comes to cooking certain cuts of meat, low and slow is definitely the way to go. Done properly this will melt collagen into mouth watering gelatin, which is absolutely amazing! A slow cooker can be an excellent way to do this, however for some reason meats cooked in a slow cooker can come out dry even when there is plenty of liquid surrounding the meat. To explore this phenomenon we did science to meat.
When making a martini, shaking with ice is a common technique to mix the ingredients. This has two easily measurable effects. The first is that the martini is cooled by the melting of ice. The second is that this melting dilutes the martini. The melting of ice seems to occur even if the gin and the ice are the same temperature initially.
Orange liqueurs are reported to have differing properties, but tend to be similar enough to only require a single bottle per collection. The collection at the Secondary Testing Facility recently had its bottle of Grand Marnier supplemented with a bottle of Cointreau, adding comparative liqueurs to our potential fields of study. For our first foray into the realm of citrusy alcohol science, we consider a simple question: which produces a better brownie, Grand Marnier or Cointreau?
Drip-pan or Reflector? What is the purpose of the under-element pans on the stove? In the spirit of science, and wanting the snow to go away, we will run some tests to see how long it takes to go from snow to boiling with both old and new “drip pans”.
For some reason, we ended up with a large number of chicken breasts in the house over the weekend. Not to waste the opportunity, we did additional science to them.
Doing Science To Stuff 