Book Review – Cooking for Geeks

About the Book

Are you the innovative type, the cook who marches to a different drummer—used to expressing your creativity instead of just following recipes? Are you interested in the science behind what happens to food while it’s cooking?

Then Cooking for Geeks (O’Reilly Media, $34.99 USD) is for you.

More than just a cookbook, Cooking for Geeks applies your curiosity to discovery, inspiration, and invention in the kitchen. Why is medium-rare steak so popular? Why do we bake some things at 350° F/175° C and others at 375° F/190° C? And how quickly does a pizza cook if we overclock an oven to 1,000° F/540° C? Author and cooking geek Jeff Potter (@cookingforgeeks) provides the answers and offers a unique take on recipes—from the sweet (a “mean” chocolate chip cookie) to the savory (duck confit sugo).

“Readers of Cooking for Geeks will be much more comfortable walking into the kitchen, picking up a frying pan, and trying something new after reading the book,” says Potter, who has been cooking since he was a child growing up in California. “Cooking for Geeks shows you how to have fun in the kitchen by blending science with cooking and takes a playful, quirky approach to teaching you how to be a better cook.”

This book will help you:

• Initialize your kitchen and calibrate your tools
• Learn about the important reactions in cooking, such as protein denaturation, Maillard reactions, and caramelization, and how they impact the foods we cook
• Play with your food using hydrocolloids and sous vide cooking
• Gain firsthand insights from interviews with researchers, food scientists, knife experts, chefs, writers, and more, including author Harold McGee, TV personality Adam Savage, chemist Hervé This, and xkcd

“There’s really no book out there like Cooking for Geeks—it’s science textbook meets cookbook, written to appeal to anyone who’s curious about how the details work in the kitchen,” says Potter. “And it’s not just for technical geeks—anyone who wants to do more than just follow a recipe will enjoy the book.”

1. Chapter 1 Hello, Kitchen!

   1. Think Like a Hacker

   2. Cooking for One

   3. Cooking for Others

2. Chapter 2 Initializing the Kitchen

   1. Approaching the Kitchen

   2. Kitchen Equipment

   3. Kitchen Organization

3. Chapter 3 Choosing Your Inputs: Flavors and Ingredients

   1. Smell + Taste = Flavor

   2. Tastes: Bitter, Salty, Sour, Sweet, Umami, Others

   3. Adapt and Experiment Method

   4. Regional/Traditional Method

   5. Seasonal Method

   6. Analytical Method

4. Chapter 4 Time and Temperature: Cooking’s Primary Variables

   1. Cooked = Time * Temperature

   2. Foodborne Illness and Staying Safebacteriadanger zone rulebacteriafoodborne illness andbacteriasurvival temperaturesdanger zone rulefood safetydanger zone rulefood safetyfoodborne illness andmarinating meatsmeatsmarinatingmeatstenderizingWell, safer—there’s no such thing as 100% safe.

   3. Key Temperatures in Cooking

5. Chapter 5 Air: Baking’s Key Variable

   1. Gluten

   2. Biological Leaveners

   3. Chemical Leaveners

   4. Mechanical Leaveners

6. Chapter 6 Playing with Chemicals

   1. Traditional Cooking Chemicals

   2. Modern Industrial Chemicals

7. Chapter 7 Fun with Hardware

   1. Sous Vide Cooking

   2. Commercial Hardware and Techniques

1. Appendix Cooking Around Allergies

   1. Substitutions for Common Allergies

2. Appendix Afterword

3. Appendix About the Author

4. Colophon

About the Author

Jeff Potter has done the cubicle thing, the startup thing, and the entrepreneur thing, and through it all maintained his sanity by cooking for friends. He studied computer science and visual art at Brown University.

Additional Resources

For an article on Jeff’s recent talk at HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth 2010), see:
http://gizmodo.com/5589621/livehope-jeff-potter-cooks-for-geeks.

To follow Jeff’s blog and see more information about the process of Cooking for Geeks, see:
http://cookingforgeeks.com.

My Take on the Book
As a guy who likes to cook, but ha had no formal training, this book was a great addition to my collection. The book provides expert tips for the beginner to expert chef in all of us. I am greatly looking forward to trying out a number of the techniques and recipes within the book!

One of the things that I did like about the book was how well the author writes for his audience. Though there were some recipes that were on the simplistic side (hamburgers), it also moves to the more complex (Salmon Gravlax) or other such dishes. Yet, even in the more complex dishes, he provides a step-by-step analysis and instruction so you are cooking like a pro!

This post was written for O’Reilly Media who provided the complimentary item in exchange for my honest review.