Culinary Science

When you're cooking, you're a chemist! Every time you follow or modify a recipe you are experimenting with acids and bases, emulsions and suspensions, gels and foams. In your kitchen you denature proteins, crystallize compounds, react enzymes with substrates, and nurture desired microbial life while suppressing harmful microbes. And unlike in a laboratory, you can eat your experiments to verify your hypotheses.

Warm beds, quaint mysteries, and the best rosemary bread this side of Pigsend Creek. Welcome to the Weary Dragon Inn. Get the next three books in the Weary Dragon Inn Cozy Fantasy series, including Beasts and Baking, Magic and Molemen, and Veils and Villains, in a convenient eBook Bundle. In Beasts and Baking, spring is on the horizon, and the Weary Dragon Inn is getting its annual deep clean. But before Bev can even finish scrubbing the windows, Carpenter Earl's workshop goes up in flames.

Spring is on the horizon, and the Weary Dragon Inn is getting its annual deep clean. But before Bev can even finish scrubbing the windows, Carpenter Earl's workshop goes up in flames. Earl's convinced the local kids are behind the mischief, but when more buildings come crashing down under mysterious circumstances, Bev's on the case once more. The cozy follow-up to Secrets and Snowflakes, Beasts and Baking is the fourth installment in the Weary Dragon Inn series, following amnesiac innkeeper Bev and the curiosities that occur in the quaint fantasy village of Pigsend.

Focusing on contemporary practices, The Culinary Imagination traces the social, aesthetic, and political history of food from myth to modernity, from ancient sources to our current wave of food mania. What does it mean to transform raw stuff into cooked dishes, which then become part of our own bodies; to savor festive meals yet resolve to renounce gluttony; to act as predators where in another life we might have become prey?

Embark on a tantalising journey into the weird and wonderful world of fermentation. Dr Johnny Drain has spent his career exploring how fermentation has shaped the bodies we inhabit, the foods we eat and the world we live in. From making live yoghurt in his grandma’s kitchen, to fermenting...

What can beer teach us about biology, history, and the natural world? From ancient Mesopotamian fermentation practices to the resurgent American craft brewery, authors Rob DeSalle and Ian Tattersall peruse the historical record and traverse the globe for engaging and often surprising stories about beer. They explain how we came to drink beer, what ingredients combine to give beers their distinctive flavors, how beer's chemistry works at the molecular level, and how various societies have regulated the production and consumption of beer.