Hands down the best cookbook we have. Much of this you can understand after years of cooking just by what seems to work the best but it's nice to have someone analyze the science behind it and give an explanation. ( )

Be your own Alton Brown. ( )

The 4/5 is more for it's usefulness to me rather than the overall quality of the book. I must admit I haven't tried any of the recipes but I did find this one very interesting to read and to think about. This is something the same as Elizabeth Zimmermann for knitters, a book that makes you think about the why of cooking methods instead of just being instructive and encouraging you to experiment with methods and results to get results for you, not necessarily what's written in books. It's a book to make you think about cooking and play with your food and to always remember that you can always dial out for Pizza (unless you're coeliac like me, then you're calling for GF friendly solutions). Aimed at people with possibly a bit more engineering skills than I have it's still an interesting look at food and it's production. ( )

I love food science stuff: two things I miss very much from having actual TV is Good Eats and America's Test Kitchen, both of which get into why things work in the kitchen.

This book does that, with the extra twist of assuming a (computer) geek audience. It's smart and charming in the process. Lots of interviews, a whole section of really weird cooking techniques, and recipes too.

I've only used one of the recipes so far: Bechamel Sauce, which turns out to be the first time EVER that I've made a cheese sauce (for veggies) that turned out the way I wanted. That said, the information about techniques, temperatures, and even food safety has changed my approach to cooking, or at least made me feel like I understand what I'm doing when I do it.

Definitely recommended. ( )

My wife and I received this as a Christmas present from her brother not long after we got married.  Though it's got recipes in it, it's not just a cookbook; indeed, there are more pages without recipes, than with.  Basically, it approaches cooking skill as not a series of recipes, but a series of principles that you can master, aimed at an audience of the "geeky" sort, who is interested in strange facts, background theories, and doing things differently.

It's a nice idea, and the book is filled with the kind of factoids that you'll irritate your wife by reading aloud to her, about how flavors work, and what the difference between baking soda and powder is, and what are the six different kinds of cooks, and so on.  I didn't always know who the book was aimed at, though. The first chapter treats the reader as someone scared of the very concept of cooking, with a lot of moments I found kinda condescending ("no, scared geek, you really can use a cooking implement that's not a microwave!").  But the later chapters get increasingly complicated; the sort of person who might find the first chapter useful is going to be intimidated by the last chapter's extolling of the virtues of sous vide cooking.  And sometimes parts of it were boring (I learned more about baking than I ever would have cared to), but that's probably down to individual taste.

As for the recipes, I've only made one so far, the white bean and garlic soup (p. 133).  It was good, but I found that Potter's technique of including the ingredients in the middle of the recipe caused me to overlook important facts about them on first readthrough.  It came out way thicker than I would have liked, but that may have been my own fault and was alleviated by adding more veggie broth in any case.  I did really like how the recipe has you toast some French bread in oil and then blend it in; the soup had a really interesting flavor.  There's also a recipe for making your own ginger lemon soda (p. 229), which my wife and I are planning on trying this week.

The best part of the book were the interviews with other cooking geeks that Potter conducted: famous chefs, Twitter recipe writers, a man who cooked a pizza in his oven on cleaning mode, the coiner of "molecular gastronomy" and more.  Each one was fascinating; Potter asked good questions and got great answers.