Food Geekery!

Awesome! Harold McGee (author of On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen) now has a column in the New York Times!

This occasional column, the Curious Cook, will be a window on that big and busy world, on the endless intricacies of foods and the ingenuity of the people who make them and study them. The column is meant to share the buzz, to pass along news of interesting scientific research on food, cooking and eating.

He's such a geek, which definitely makes him part of our tribe, as shown by his story of how he got into the field of popularizing food science:

It was 30 years ago in a university library that I first stumbled across the scientific approach to food in the pages of Cereal Chemistry, The Journal of Food Science and similar publications. As I browsed through a couple of issues I couldn’t help grinning at the incongruity of high scientific language and high-tech instrumentation being applied to utterly ordinary, everyday things. It was strangely exhilarating to see such intellectual firepower aimed at the kneading of bread dough or the grilling of a hamburger or the mitigation of the gassy effects of beans, to be confronted with startling scanning-electron-microscope close-ups of the bacteria in yogurt, the mold in blue cheese, the surface of cooked spaghetti.
...
Now, after three decades and two books about the science of cooking, that initially strange literature is familiar territory to me — familiar and still full of surprises. My heart leaps when I collect my mail and spot the blue-sky cover of The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Incidentally, this week's column is about garlic with green spots, and why they can turn foods bluish-turquoise when mixed in.

As a final note, I have found that the combination of Alton Brown's Good Eats and On Food and Cooking is great for learning food science. Alton shows the basics of the concept with practical examples, and has these great visuals to cement the ideas in your mind (e.g., showing the action of lactobacteria using sock puppets, or using clear tubes filled with D-cell batteries to symbolize the starch forms amylose and amylopectin). Then you can delve into a few pages of McGee to get the full story.

McGee's book is also an excellent reason for why I haven't bothered to hook up my television. How can half an hour of sitcoms (80% filler, 20% good zingers, on a good day) compete with, "Man... I should really know this stuff... time to bone up on the Maillard reaction"?