Cooking for Engineers

Recently, I received a wireless thermometer from Thermoworks to try out. Their newest product is called Smoke and is specifically designed to help people barbecue and smoke food at home. Smoke has two parts - a base unit (which takes two of Thermoworks standardized Pro-Series probes) and a wireless receiver unit - which lets the user track the air temperature and the food temperature without going outside to the smoker.

Thermoworks is selling the Smoke at $99 and this would definitely welcome tool for anyone who likes to slow cook food outside.

These days when I reach for a spatula to turn food in a pan, I've been finding myself grabbing the GastroMax Slotted Turner more often than not. Tina bought this spatula for me after months (or maybe years) of listening to me complain about our various spatulas. After buying the GastroMax Turner, my complaining has stopped.

Ah, saturated fat. The most maligned and misunderstood "bad" food in the last thirty years. During the last year, I've been trying to figure out why everyone thinks saturated fat is evil and I have been unable to discover any evidence that there is evidence that saturated fats are bad for you. In fact, quite the opposite. I'll take this space and discuss briefly (although it might seem long to you) saturated fats, polyunsaturated fats, cholesterol, and the misconceptions we've been brought up with. I'll touch briefly on trans fatty acids too, but that topic is so nasty that it really deserves it's own article along with the possible manipulation of the American diet by food oil companies.

One question that I keep getting asked (and that I keep asking myself when standing in the produce section of the market) is whether or not a particular type of fruit will ripen at home. It turns out there are only a handful of fruits which get sweeter after being picked: apples, bananas, kiwifruit, mangoes, and pears. There are a dozen additional fruits that continue to ripen (through aroma or textural changes) and all the rest do not. I put together the following chart listing the fruits which do ripen after being picked as well as those which do not from a variety of sources including but not limited to On Food and Cooking, Cookwise, Modernist Cuisine, and The Science of Good Food.