The very first blog post on Khymos appeared on August 27th, 2006. That’s 5 years ago today – and to celebrate this the following post will be about Khymos and blogging. It’s going to be quite introvert, but hopefully you’ll appreciate the look behind the scenes! I 2006 had no clue that I would still be going on for so long. Five words that sum up the 5 years of blogging are: fun, readers, research, experiments and photography. Let me explain:

FUN: Blogging has been great fun, and I would never have continued for so long if I hadn’t enjoyed it. I’ve had a couple of long breaks, and my posting frequency varies, but that’s because of a rule I’ve put up for my blogging: No deadlines! This is to make sure the blog is driven by ethusiasm. My philosophy is that if I enjoy writing, I hope you will enjoy reading!

READERS: First and foremost blogging is fun because of you! Without readers, I wouldn’t have kept on blogging. All the feedback, comments, discussions and emails are very much appreciated, not to mention all the interesting questions and observations you send me. My only regret here is that there are questions I received months (and even more than a year ago) which I haven’t answered yet… Easy questions are often answered as quickly as possible, whereas the more difficult ones may take a little longer. But if you haven’t heard back from me in let’s say 1-2 weeks – please send a new email!

RESEARCH: Another reason it has been great fun is the opportunity it gives me to research subjects and do experiments in a more structured way. I actually learn a lot about food and chemistry while blogging. Once I’ve blogged about a topic it’s very easy to include it in presentations/lectures I give on molecular gastronomy and popular food science.

EXPERIMENTS: I really enjoy researching a subject, especially when I manage to figure out of something. In fact, few things are more rewarding than solving a problem or gaining new insight. But the great thing about chemistry is that you can do experiments as well. And with food chemistry you’re even allowed to taste!

PHOTOGRAPHY: When popularising science, and chemistry in particular, I find that illustrations and pictures are essential. As it happens I also enjoy taking pictures, so the blog lets me do a lot of things that I enjoy at the same time!

How I got started
When I first became interested in the connection between food and chemistry in the late 90′s, I searched the Internet without finding much information. I did however find some very interesting books in the faculty library, including Harold McGee’s “On Food and Cooking – The Science and Lore of the Kitchen”. Having found books about the subject, I soon started to give popular science presentations. In 2004 I was invited to attend the “International Workshop on Molecular Gastronomy” in Erice, Sicily. This was a great experience and I enjoyed meeting many of the scientists, writers and chefs involved with molcular gastronomy. When I first put up a webpage in 2002 the main purpose was to maintain a more or less comprehensive listing of books and websites with relevance to molecular gastronomy. I published it mainly as a bibliography related to my popular science lectures. After I left the University of Oslo, the page was moved to it’s present location at khymos.org. Needless to say, I’m no longer able to keep track of all the interesting things happening related to science enabled cooking, given the increasing popularity as well as the many chefs, restaurants, books, websites and interviews appearing. Therefore I’m very thankful when readers contact me about things they think I should blog about.

What do I blog about?
My blog posts mostly fall into one of the following categories:

• Announcements and recommendations of books, blogs, events, new websites etc. It’s often difficult to draw a line here, but my guiding principle here is that if I find it interesting, I hope you will as well. And of course, feel free to share news, tips and announcements with me using the contact form.
• Feature posts on a researched topic which almost always involve some cooking and experimentation, often requiring a litterature search as well. These are time consuming posts to write, but also very rewarding for myself. I wish I had more time for these!
• Travel reports such as those from EuroFoodChem, The Flemish Primitives and the MG seminars in Copenhagen allow me to practice as a journalist.
• The food blogging event They Go Really Well Together (TGRWT) allowed me as well as all the participants to explore food pairings based on shared impact odorants.
• The occasional interview satisfies my thirst for learning more from knowledgeable people I admire. I should do more interviews!
• Book reviews is something I’ve only just begun doing. Time consuming, but also rewarding.

A category which I haven’t dug properly into yet is recipes for conventional food accompanied by scientific explanations. This has been pioneered by Hervé This in Révélations gastronomiques (available in German but not in English), and I love the format that answers all the whys right there in the middle of the recipe. I hope I will find time for such blog posts in the future!

The current blog
After a complete makeover of the blog in January 2009 I decided to move the static content from the old Khymos site to the blog. Some changes have been made, so for those of you who regularily read Khymos feed through an RSS reader or a news aggregator, I suggest that you visit the website to check out what the complete site looks like now.

Since the facelift in January 2009 there are a couple of notable changes to help you navigate around the site. These include a tag cloud, a list of popular posts and a list of the last comments (all shown in the picture below). There is also a search field providing a full text search of the entire contents of Khymos. One of the technical advantages of a blog over a conventional website is of course the RSS funtion which allows posts to be aggregated and served to readers in their favorite RSS reader. If you’re not familiar with this, try pressing the large orange icon in the upper right corner and see what happens! Most web browser today include a basic RSS reader. For those who prefer email there is also a possibility to subscribe to blog posts via email.

If you only read the RSS you miss a number of features available on the webiste.

Most popular posts and pages
The most viewed posts and pages from April 2008 – August 2011 are (total number of views in this time period):

Top 15 blog posts
Towards the perfect soft boiled egg (90,185)
Perfect steak with DIY “sous vide” cooking (43,986)
First experiments with sodium alginate (34,698)
A mathematician cooks sous vide (19,156)
Edible cocktails with gelatin (18,304)
A pinch of salt for your coffee, Sir? (15,299)
Hydrocolloid recipe collection (13,184)
Speeding up the Maillard reaction (12,233)
No-knead bread (9,227)
TGRWT #10: Pizza with blue cheese and pineapple (8,994)
TGIF: Fed up with foam? (8,805)
TGIF: Periodic tables of food (8,180)
Glutamic acid in tomatoes and parmesan (7,696)
Ice cubes and air bubbles (7,477)
Coffee espuma with garlic and chocolate (TGRWT #1) (7,336)

Top 10 pages
Recipe collection (120,066)
TGRWT (25,916)
Flavor pairing (20,389)
Molecular gastronomy (15,949)
Suppliers (13,476)
About Khymos (13,041)
Articles (12,080)
People (7,862)
Videos (7,084)
Reference & technique (6,010)

Blog posts I enjoyed writing
Looking at the list above suggests that my philosophy about you enjoying reading what I enjoy writing doesn’t always hold true. Some of the posts that I really enjoyed researching and writing do not show up on the lists above. Here’s my secret insiders guide to the best hidden posts of Khymos that do not show up in the lists above:

The series on Ten tips for practical molecular gastronomy
The serices on Wonders of extraction: water, oil, ethanol, espresso, pressure
Nocino walnut liqueur part I and part II
The follow up posts on egg yolks: Perfect egg yolks, Perfect egg yolks part 2
Norwegian egg coffee
DIY mineral water (including an Excel spreadsheet)
Soda fountain science explained
Interview with Chris Young (co-author of Modernist Cuisine!)

Some statistics
So far I’ve written 270 blog posts, including the one you are reading now. The blog posts are grouped in 24 categories and have been tagged with 1033 different tags. Comments are moderated, the major reason for this being spam. The Akismet spam killer has so far caught ~445,000 spam comments since I turned it on. Compare that with the 2207 comments that have been approved and I think you see why comment moderation is necessary (although a side effect is that legitimate comments are being held back for approval, thereby delaying the discussion in the comment threads).

A grand total of 2.9 terabytes have been served during these 5 years according to the logs of the company hosting Khymos. This amount of traffic is the result from 8.5 million visits resulting in 78 million hits, requesting 61 million files and 30 million pages in total. But one can only wonder what kind of traffic numbers all the spam comments generate… More numbers from the logs can be found in the table below.

Webmetrics is tricky, and simply counting hits or views may not tell the whole truth. One company which specialises in web metrics is Quantcast. Their monthly visitor count for Khymos is shown below:

More detailed data is available directly on Quantcast’s page about Khymos.

The number of RSS subscribers in Google Reader has been growing steadily and a couple of weeks ago it was around 3500. But then something happened – I don’t know what – and the number is now approaching 40000. The strange thing however is that this increase in subscribers is not reflected in the other statistics, so it’s hard to really tell whether it’s a realistic number or not.

Blogging software
I can still remember how I started reading about different blogging platforms available in 2006. I ended up chosing WordPress which at that time had reached v.2. Today I’m so happy that I chose WordPress! I’m amazed by the development team and what they have achieved, and at this point I should really forward a big thank you to the team behind WordPress. During these five years the software has really matured and it’s a great tool for any blogger – hereby highly recommended (and did I mention that it’s free?).

More about photography
Some of the very first pictures on the blog were shot with a Canon Powershot A400, a simple point & shoot camera that left a lot to be desired in handling. With enough light however the camera takes decent pictures, and the 3MP sensor serves as a good reminder that when having pictures printed in the typical 10 x 13/15 cm size you really don’t need more pixels. In 2007 it was time to upgrade to a Ricoh GX100 – I got this camera after long considerations, and what appealed to me was the combination of a real wide angle zoom (equivalent to 24-70 mm) and full manual controls. The downside is perhaps that the camera is a bit slow, and the low light capabilities are also limited. And then in 2010 I finally stepped up and got myself a DSLR. I considered both D90 and D700 from Nikon, as well as the 7D and 5D mark II from Canon, but in the end I landed at Nikon D300s. The controls and handling are excellent, and the camera is fast – it actually takes the picture when you press the button, not a second or so later as is the case with many P&S cameras. In combination with the my prime lenses Nikkor 35 mm 1:2 and 20 mm 1:2.8 (which I bougt used) I’m well off in most low light situations. Both have excellent close ranges, and with the narrow depth of field they are excellent companions for food photography. And if needed I could always use the macro function on GX100 if needed.

This is off topic, but I just thought I’d write short note to say that I’ve brushed up the look of the blog. New elements included are a menu bar and an extra column. This will hopefully make navigation easier. And you might also notice that the page width has increased, allowing me to post pictures 620 pixels wide. I look forward to that

In the near future I plan to transfer the pages with listings from the static pages (khymos.org) to the menu bar of the blog (blog.khymos.org) as this will allow me to use one publishing platform for updates. The remaining pages will probably be posted as blogposts. A number of things can go wrong when doing changes like this, so I’d be grateful if you could report issues (especially browser issues) you might encounter around the site.

In case you wonder about the technical details: I run the latest version of WordPress with a modified version of the Contender theme. The dropdown menus are from Pixopoint.

Update:
Some compatibility issues between an anti-spam plugin and the commentfrom caused all commenters to be met with the following: “Sorry, but it seems you are a spambot”. This should be fixed now.

Most popular blogpost
The most popular post by far this year has been the post on how to achieve a “Perfect steak with DIY “sous vide” cooking”. This is also the post which was most commented, counting 42 comments so far. I really enjoy that this topic has become so popular. Low temperature cooking can make a huge difference in people’s cooking, yet it doesn’t require any sophisticated equipment apart from a thermometer. It’s perhaps the best example of a technical application of molecular gastronomy in a home kitchen.

Most popular static page
The khymos site got a jump start in January as the static page on “How to prepare the perfect boiled egg” made it all the way up to the front page of digg.com (many readers left comments here). It’s amazing how this can drive up the traffic on a site!

Most time consuming post
The single post which took the most time to research and prepare was without doubt the one were I presented the collection of hydrocolloid recipes. I spent quite some time searching for recipes and an equal amount of time formatting and converting them all to metric units and shortening down the text. Reception has been good, and since it was published in August, it has been downloaded more than 7000 times. I hope to publish a revised edition in 2008, and I am of course always eager to hear from you, especially if you have some recipes that you think should be included.

Most fun to write
I blog because I enjoy it. But if had to chose which posts were most fun to research and to write, I think the list would include “Perfect steak with DIY “sous vide” cooking”, “Two flavour pairing case studies”, “New perspectives on whisky and water” and “First experiments with sodium alginate”.

TGRWT
The first round of the food blogging event “They go really well together” was launched in April. Since then 7 rounds have been completed with almost 90 submissions in total! I’ve had a lot of fun both preparing dishes and browsing through the round-ups. The current round is on white chocolate and caviar, and since December has been a busy month for most people (including myself), the deadline has been extended to February 1st. So if you’ve never participated before – why not try out one of the “classic” flavor pairings of molecular gastronomy?

DMBLGiT
I admit that I am a passionate amateur photographer, and I have submitted a couple of pictures to the monthly “Does my blog look good in this” contest. But with around 100 contributions every month, and most of them of very high quality, I haven’t had great expectations of winning. Therefore it was a pleaseant surprise that my picture of cherries (used to illustrate “Ten tips for practical molecular gastronomy, part 6″) made it all the way to the top of the August 2007 round of DMBLGiT (click to view gallery).

2008 blog forecast
One of the first things I’ll do in 2008 is to complete the series of post with “10 tips for practical molecular gastronomy” which I started in January. Apart from this I have a number of unfinished projects that only need a little more research and experimentation – so let’s hope that I can find some time for this besides my full time job and my family!

A great thing about blogging is that it allows me to interact with the readers – you. So far there are 514 comments to my 112 posts – thank you very much for taking time to comment my posts! Some of you also contact my by email, and I try my best to answer all emails, but if you haven’t heard back from me – don’t hesitate sending me a reminder to webmaster (at) khymos (dot) org!

Because of all the spam comments (67,506 so far!) it’s difficult to say something about the number of people actually visiting the site, but there’s at least a couple of hundred unique visitors every day which is very nice and encouraging. So to all my readers I just want to say Happy New Year! (and in case you missed it, go back and read “Happy New Year with the Science of Champagne!” from last year).

Some time ago one of my google alerts directed me to a brand new album by Food called Molecular Gastronomy, but it was only yesterday that a friend (check out his review of the CD) sent me a list of the tracks. To my great surprise the first tracked is named after my website – khymos (followed by tracks such as texturas, heston and spherification). Feels like an honour! Thank you Food! I haven’t been able to locate sound samples of the CD, but I’ll post an update if they should become available. The CD can be bought directly from the record company or through Amazon UK.

I’ve received the Thinking blogger award from Cocktail Party Physics, Nika’s culinaria, Jon’s travel adventures, Lab cat and Chadzilla now. Thanks a lot folks!

I guess it’s my turn to hand the award on now. Here are five blogs I read and learn a lot from: Food for design has many fascinating posts on design, architecture, science, nature and molecular gastronomy. Chadzilla and Hungry in Hogtown love to experiment in the kitchen and they’re good at documenting it! I also like the approach of Cooking for engineers and certainly also Harold McGee’s illuminating posts on different aspects of food science over at News for curious cooks. Read and learn! Besides these there are oohhh so many blogs I wish I had time to read more often … and your’s might be one of them.

I have created the blog blog.khymos.org to accompany the website khymos.org. The name of this site, khymos, is Greek meaning “juice”. It is however related to al-kimiya, the Arabic word from which our word chemistry derives from. Other related words include Khemia, the old name of Egypt (meaning land of black earth) and the Greek khein and khymatos meaning “to pour” and “that which is poured out” respectively. So in a sense, the word khymos provides a link between chemistry and food! I therefore thought it would be a suitable name for a site dealing with molecular gastronomy and related subjects.