Posts by Harold McGee

Arrowroot and potato starches come from below-ground storage organs, cornstarch and flour from seeds, and the two different kinds of sources produce starches with different qualities. Briefly, the root starches have larger granules and...

Most shellfish are best cooked quickly at a high temperature. Like fish, they have very active protein-digesting enzymes in their tissues, and at low temperatures they can digest themselves into mush. Squid and octopus are something of...

The great thing about sous vide cooking is that it gives you really precise control over cooking temperatures, and thereby over the texture of meats and fish in particular, which is very sensitive to temperature. My understanding is that...

Copper is useful in high-temperature applications because it’s such a good conductor of heat. I don’t think there’s any chemical advantage to a copper surface, though. Sugar work does go way back, at least to the 13th century in Baghdad!...

Let the bugging end: olive oil does not raise the smoke point of butter! The milk solids begin to brown and then burn at exactly the same temperatures. Harold

Flavor is a wonderful and endless subject—which is why I want to write a book about it! Very briefly, the surprising aromas in wine are mostly the product of the yeasts that convert grape sugars into alcohol. Yeasts are amazing chemical...

I wrote a long chapter about the supposed aluminum-Alzheimer’s link in 1990 in The Curious Cook. It still looks as though aluminum is not a causative factor—people who for various reasons have a high aluminum intake (from antacids,...

The usefulness of basting depends on what you baste with. A water-based baste can be helpful, for the same reason that repeated door-openings can be: slowing the heating means that the breast meat in particular cooks more gradually and...

I like to use my non-contact thermometer to check pan temperatures, the temperature of the milk I use to make yogurt every week (using a culture that came originally from India), and the water i use to make coffee and various teas; foods...

It’s true that sugar can help balance and to some extent replace salt in a brine, and it does add its own flavor and can enhance browning (though glucose or honey do better at this than table sugar). However, sugar doesn’t penetrate meat...