Category equipment

A mathematician cooks sous vide

Douglas Baldwin with two immersion circulators and a vacuum chamber sealer. Since I got my immersion circulator in December I’ve discovered that there are two critical questions that always come up as I hold a piece of meat in my…

Kitchen gadgets

Popular science magazine has an amusing article on “The future of food” which portrays Dave Arnold, apparently the “man behind the curtain of today’s hottest movement in cooking”. I don’t buy all of this, but he’s no doubt had a…

Clarification of stock and other liquids

In a comment to the last post, Chad asked how the clarification with laboratory glass ware works. Here’s how. Basically it’s a filtration. But if you would use a normal filter paper (such as a coffee filter) and let gravity…

Carbonated fruit the iSi way

I blogged about carbonated strawberries some while ago. Those were made using dry ice which unfortunately is not always easy to get hold of. Last week however I bought a iSi Gourmet Whipper – one of those Ferran Adria uses…

First experiments with sodium alginate

Here’s some pictures and a video of my first experiments with sodium alginate and spherification. I used sodium alginate from the Texturas series and calcium chloride from a drug store. Needless to say, I’m very fascinated by the texture and…

Practical molecular gastronomy, part 3

Get a basic understanding of heat transfer, heat capacity and heat conductance. Since a lot of cooking involves temperature manipulations, it’s a good idea to get a basic understandning of how heat is transferred and how well it is stored…