Are you the innovative type, the cook who marches to a different drummer — used to expressing your creativity instead of just following recipes? Are you interested in the science behind what happens to food while it’s cooking? Do you want to learn what makes a recipe work so you can improvise and create your own unique dish?

More than just a cookbook, Cooking for Geeks applies your curiosity to discovery, inspiration, and invention in the kitchen. Why is medium-rare steak so popular? Why do we bake some things at 350 F/175 C and others at 375 F/190 C? And how quickly does a pizza cook if we overclock an oven to 1,000 F/540 C? Author and cooking geek Jeff Potter provides the answers and offers a unique take on recipes — from the sweet (a “mean” chocolate chip cookie) to the savory (duck confit sugo).

This book is an excellent and intriguing resource for anyone who wants to experiment with cooking, even if you don’t consider yourself a geek.

• Initialize your kitchen and calibrate your tools.
• Learn about the important reactions in cooking, such as protein denaturation, Maillard reactions, and caramelization, and how they impact the foods we cook.
• Play with your food using hydrocolloids and sous vide cooking.
• Gain firsthand insights from interviews with researchers, food scientists, knife experts, chefs, writers, and more.

The author is a geek himself and brings “geek-like” approaches to the subject matter – deep intellectual curiosity, affinity for details, appreciation of problem solving and hacking, scientific method, and a love of technology. What is even better is his filtering of cooking concepts by a computer coder’s framework, analogizing recipes to executable code, viewing of ingredients as inputs and as variables, running processes over and over in a logical manner to test and improve outcomes. This is not a mere literary shoe-horning of cooking concepts into a coder’s framework but an ingenuous approach to the topics that should loudly resonate with geeks.

Related Books:

1. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen – Harold McGee
2. How to Cook Everything (Completely Revised 10th Anniversary Edition): 2,000 Simple Recipes for Great Food – By Mark Bittman
3. The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution – By Alice Waters
4. The Pleasures of Cooking for One : Judith Jones
5. Ad Hoc at Home : Thomas Keller
6. The Instinct Diet: Use Your Five Food Instincts to Lose Weight and Keep it Off – By Susan B. Roberts Ph.D
7. The Conscious Cook: Delicious Meatless Recipes That Will Change the Way You Eat : Tal Ronnen
8. Food For Thought : Joost Elffers, Saxton Freymann