A guide to sous-vide at home — “A Brief Guide to Sous Vide at Home“. I have written this eBook to bring together the sous-vide writings from this platform in a logical format. It is available via Kindle for free. The description reads: “Sous vide (pronounced soo veed) is the biggest advance in home cooking methods since…

A no-mess duck confit with all the flavour of the original A specialty of southwest France, confit is steeped in tradition. It was developed for very practical purposes — preserving meat before the advent of refrigeration. …

Subtle, but worth a try — Plant material mainly consists of water held in a cell whose wall is strengthened by pectin, with the walls of adjacent cells bonded together by pectin and hemicellulose. Cooking involves softening the cell walls, and breaking down the glue between cells. This occurs across a range of temperatures, and softening…

Slow, temperature-controlled unattended cooking — Meat can be thought of as muscle fibres made up of protein strands bundled together and encased in collagen sheaths for support. In land-dwelling animals, the collagen sheaths extend beyond the muscle fibres and intertwine to form the tendon that attaches to bone and gives muscle its leverage. …

Heritage food processing — Yoghurt (a word of Turkish origin meaning ‘thick’) originated in W. and C. Asia. It was something of a breakthrough for the times because it enabled milk to be kept longer, it had a refreshing tartness and it could be consumed by lactose intolerant individuals (i.e. most of W. and…

The story of chocolate and the science of tempering — While humans have been drinking chocolate for millennia, they only worked out how to turn it into a block fairly recently (not much more than 100 years). The process involves multiple steps, starting with a cacao tree. Step 1: Harvesting The fruit of the cacao tree (genus Theobroma, translating from the Greek as…

What is it? — The name translates as ‘under vacuum’, and it is usually associated with cooking vacuum-packed food in a heated water-bath, however the vacuum packing is not its most important feature. Its most important feature is precise temperature control of the water. Temperature is an important aspect of cooking, but it is…