Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food

If you're a programmer, hacker, or maker who is interested in learning how to cook, this book is for you. In this book, I'll cover the basics of cooking and provide a number of simple and fun recipes as part of the food hacking experiments, while at the same time exploring the science behind the example recipes to allow you to start discovering your own style.

If you're already comfortable in the kitchen, you'll find this book covers a number of new emerging technologies that are making their way from the lab to the kitchen. A number of these new techniques can be adapted for everyday use to make life in the kitchen easier and allow you to discover new ways of cooking.

Why do some meals turn out great, while others fail? What scientific principles and tools can help guide you in creating new, memorable experiences? And how can you have more fun cooking for friends, coworkers, or a date?

By applying the same tools hackers use in experimenting and debugging technology, this book answers these questions by building up a framework describing what happens in the cooking process. With an understanding of the "why" behind the "what," the complex system of expectations, perceptions, and processes is reduced to a roadmap between the store, kitchen, and table.

Most existing cookbooks are "code," where the reader executes the instructions without knowing how to create new code. If you are an experienced cook, standard cookbooks inspire, remind, and hint at how to produce a meal. However, if you are a novice cook, these same texts fail to explain how to recover when an exception occurs, because the rules-of-thumb and patterns a seasoned chef knows from experience aren't codified as part of recipes.