Classic book for the cook who wants to know a little bit more about the science of food and cooking. And while it has not exactly unlocked the black art of cooking for me, it's a great resource book to have in the kitchen. This is NOT a cookbook -- it's a guide to food, a dynamic explanation about where your food comes from, the science behind how it cooks/blends/rises and how preparation techniques impact taste. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. On Food and Cooking is the classic that weaves together history, science, and practical advice in mesmerizing (really) discussion of every conceivable topic of interest in the kitchen.

I asked my brother (scientist and cook) to get me something like that for my birthday, and he sent this book. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. It's 800 pages of all the tedious details about ingredients and cooking methods that you never wanted to know, and Harold McGee gets props for putting together these comprehensive tome. So it's not about whether or not you want to eat food taken straight from the bosom of mother nature, it's about in what way and to what extent you want to modify and control the food you eat. Now, for its twentieth anniversary, Harold McGee has prepared a new, fully revised and updated edition of On Food and Cooking.Having the pleasure of working with Harold McGee at The French Laundry kitchen was a dream come true. We cook them to draw out or disable more undesirable toxins and enzymes and to unlock nutrients, and we dilute toxins in the case of spices and herbs to the point where we find them enjoyable. 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. He has worked alongside some of world's most innovative chefs, including Thomas Keller and Heston Blumenthal.

The writing is succinct but not tedious to follow, and every chapter packs in a spectrum of interesting facts. Harold McGee's original ON FOOD AND COOKING was acclaimed as a masterpiece on both sides of the Atlantic, and won the 1986 André Simon Food Book of the Year.Nothing could be more welcome than a revised and expanded verison of Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking. McGee on Food and Cookery is an expanded version of Harold McGee's classic exploration of science in the kitchen. On Food and Cooking is unique, engrossing reading and a major contribution to great culinary literature. However, I’ll keep my (much smaller) copy of the 1st edition, because I want to follow how McGee’s thinking has modified and changed over the twenty years between 1984 and 2004.

Though other books have been written about kitchen science, On Food and Cooking remains unmatched in the accuracy, clarity, and thoroughness of its explanations, and the intriguing way in which it blends science with the historical evolution of foods and cooking techniques. Any time you want to know what you're actually doing when you're in the kitchen, this will spell it out for you. Plants as common as cabbage, lima beans, potatoes and lettuce have had some of their old wild, natural toxicity bred out of them.He has rewritten the text almost completely, expanded it by two-thirds, and commissioned more than 100 new illustrations. When I ruined cream sauce by cooking it at a too hot temperature (so that instead of thickening, the cream just broke down into water and oil), I thought I needed to know a little more about exactly what was going on when I cooked. There are handy little science class diagrams which help clarify and text boxes containing recipes, lore and writing hundreds of years old. 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.

Now completely rewritten for a new generation, reflecting the seismic shifts in science and upsurge in home cooking over the past two decades, this new book will amaze all those who love food. By the time you have read all about dough, you will be able to make it and use it without need for reference to a step-by-step guide. McGEE ON FOOD AND COOKING renders the everyday miracles of the kitchen wondrous and fascinating, shedding light on questions that have puzzled generations of cooks.Nearly anything you might want to know about the history, etymology, and process of gastronomy is covered in this volume, but even that is too dry a description to really explain how fun it is. Instead, there are entire pages of historical and scientific context, giving a complete picture of each topic being covered. I was lucky enough to attend a talk by Harold McGee and he is still just as charming and enthusiastic as he seems in the book. While that would certainly work to improve your technique when looking up a specific ingredient, you'd miss out on a lot. His book On Food and Cooking has won numerous awards and is used widely in food science courses at many universities.