Skip to Content
Cooking for Geeks
book

Cooking for Geeks

by Jeff Potter
August 2010
Intermediate to advanced
431 pages
18h 49m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Cooking for Geeks

Chapter 7. Fun with Hardware

IF YOU’RE ANYTHING LIKE ME, THIS IS THE FIRST CHAPTER YOU’LL FLIP TO WHILE PERUSING THIS BOOK IN THE BOOKSTORE. And, might I add, you have excellent taste.

While this chapter is designed such that a foodie-geek can jump right in, really, it does assume that you’re up to speed with pairing flavors, that you understand various cooking and baking techniques, and that you’re familiar with some of the chemistry concepts covered in earlier chapters. So, don’t judge this book solely by this chapter.

Modern commercial kitchens, probably including the high-end ones in your town, use many tools that consumers rarely encounter but that can help create some absolutely stellar meals. We’ll cover a few of the commercial and industrial tools used in preparing foods, and throw in a few, uh, “crazy” (and fun!) things that you can do as well.

Time and temperature really are the two key variables in cooking (see Chapter 4). Under normal circumstances, cooking is performed with these variables at moderate values: roasting potatoes for half an hour at around 350°F / 177°C, baking pizza at 450°F / 230°C for 10 minutes, or churning ice cream at –20°F / –29°C for an hour or so. But what happens when you move one of these variables to an extreme?

Cooking at extreme temperatures isn’t as uncommon as it might sound at first. Potatoes, for example, wrapped in foil and roasted in the coals of a campfire are in an environment that reaches well above 800°F / 425°C. With this in mind, ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Cooking for Geeks, 2nd Edition

Cooking for Geeks, 2nd Edition

Jeff Potter
Fitness for Geeks

Fitness for Geeks

Bruce W. Perry
The Goal

The Goal

Eliyahu M. Goldratt, Jeff Cox

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449389543Errata Page