Cheeseburger in hydrochloric acid

Do ice cubes made with heavy water float or sink?

Exotic ways to cut through butter

Spectacular ways of destroying pumpkins for Halloween

Tea chemistry

See Martyn Poliakoff boil an egg

(Martyn mentions that the yellow color of egg yolks is due to a sulfur containing compound, but I’m not really convinced he’s right about that. The yellow color is mainly due to a group of chemical compounds called xanthophylls which have long conjugated double bond systems that absorb light. And BTW – if you want to dissolve the egg shell in your own kitchen: skip the hydrochloric acid and use vinegar instead.)

Baking a cake in the lab with akward equipment…

… and then figuring out what to do with the cake
(it wasn’t eaten since it was made in a chemical lab)

Mirror images: Carraway and spearmint

Fun chemistry with Crispy creme eggs

Chocolate and roses for Valentines day

As the name suggests, the TGIF posts are a little less serious than what I otherwise post here at Khymos. I hope you enjoy it

A recent cover feature of Time magazine was “10 Ideas That Are Changing The World”. According to journalist Joel Stein ” ideas are the secret power that this planet runs on”, and guess what? Idea #5 is Kitchen Chemistry. Some are fed up with foams (why does everyone think molecular gastronomy is only about foams anyway?), but my guess is that scientific approaches in the kitchen will become more and more common in the years to come and I certainly welcome this focus on kitchen chemistry.

This paradigm shift won’t be such a big deal in practice. Your oven is pretty much an advanced science gadget already, you use meat thermometers, and that measuring cup looks an awful lot like a beaker. You’re just going to have to step it up a little: replace that liquid-measuring cup with a more accurate dry-weight scale; get a vacuum sealer like that FoodSaver gadget and a Crock-Pot that stays at a precise temperature so you can sous vide meat (which involves cooking it in a bag for a long time in a low-temperature water bath); learn how to use simple chemicals like agar-agar and xanthan gum (just better versions of gelatin and cornstarch, really); review a little high school chemistry. No big deal.