Cookwise: The Secrets of Cooking Revealed

Cookwise lifts the veil surrounding the culinary arts, allowing anyone to become the master of their own kitchen.

Before I got a copy of this book, I saw cooking as a confusing, random process requiring a combination of extraordinary good luck and expensive ingredients. How can you tell when something is cooked all the way through, without a timer and a prayer? Why do you need baking soda and what appears to be a frightening amount of butter? What type of oil should you use to grease that pan, if at all?

I realized, though, (while watching Ace of Cakes actually) that there is a definite science to cooking, something far more basic than the Top Chef world of foams, proteins and molecular gastronomy. You need these things for leavening, show more forming structures, blending tastes! But where could I get this information outside of a chemistry class?

The answer is Cookwise. This book explains the WHY behind every recipe - down to the way molecules bind at different temperatures - arming the reader with the foundation of culinary knowledge necessary for successfully selecting, revising and preparing any recipe.

Cookwise is a thick book, perfect for browsing and studying at a leisurely pace, to ensure you absorb all it has to offer. show less

One of my favorite cookbooks of all time. Not just recipes, she teaches you how to "read" your food to determine both what went right/wrong and how to change things next time to get the result you want. This is a book I pick up used copies of whenever I find them in order to pass on to friends who want to level up their cooking.

Now that I've looked through this one, I vaguely remember reading it a few years ago, but I liked it better then, for some reason. This time around, I went from being totally impressed to completely overwhelmed in just a few pages. The book starts with bread. Well, I bake bread. So I know about that. But this went so far over my head, it was into the stratosphere. I was overwhelmed with a discussion of which kind of flour I needed, based on protein content. Then we got into the importance of adding a little crushed ice to the batter for some reason and a little malt barely syrup and something else, and on and on and on.

The one recipe I did try, shallot mashed potatoes with garlic, was a complete disaster. Too soupy and too hard. I show more followed the recipe instead of using my own instincts, so I should have cooked the potatoes until done, checking them myself, instead of going by the time in the recipe.

I did copy a couple of dessert recipes (what else?), one for this decadent chocolate thingy and one for pralines. We'll see how those turn out.

In my opinion, this cookbook is best used as a reference. If you have a recipe that isn't working for some reason, this is a good place to look for why. Maybe more experienced cooks or ones willing to follow all the complicated directions and look for all the special ingredients would turn out some fabulous food, but I do not have the time or patience for that. I did enjoy all the name dropping and hints from famous chefs. But I don't think I'll bother with this one again. show less

Definitely cooking with the chemistry/science buff in mind. Somehow I appreciate the info and yet yearn for the mystery. When I get more upset about failed recipes, this the book to which I will turn. :-)

This is my favorite Science of Cooking book -- comprehensive, clear, more approachable than McGee's and less affected than A. Brown's.

Not the kind of book you just sit down and read cover to cover - it is a cookbook, after all - and lacking the adorable, elementary school science teacher vibe she brings to her spots on Alton Brown's Good Eats, but still a pretty amazing book. As someone who would rather learn underlying principles and then be shooed out the door than master recipes by rote, this dense volume is right up my alley. You can see why Alton hero-worships her so fervently.

This cookbook is fabulous. You don't just learn how to cook things, you learn the science of WHY the recipes work. I love the multigrain bread recipe in this book.