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| The New Kitchen Science: A Guide to Know the Hows and Whys for Fun and Success in the Kitchen | 
 enlarge | Author: Howard Hillman
Publisher: Mariner Books
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy New: $2.12
You Save: $12.88 (86%)
New (30) Used (31) from $1.63
Avg. Customer Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 83196
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.9
ISBN: 061824963X
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.5
UPC: 046442249638
EAN: 9780618249633
ASIN: 061824963X
Publication Date: February 19, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: SHIPS TODAY!! BRAND NEW BOOK
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| Customer Reviews:
 Informative March 16, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book is a cyclopedia of how stuff works in the kitchen. It is written in question-and-answer format, addressing numerous kitchen topic, like "Which is better, rock or sea salt?" and "What's wrong with farmed fishes?". The book is divided into chapters addressing cooking equipment, cooking methods, meats, seafood, dairy products, eggs, fruits and vegetables, sauces and thickeners, seasonings, oils and fats, baking, beverages, food storage, health and nutrition, and diets. It includes a list of references for further reading, and index. It is clearly not a cookbook, but there are a few recipes for basic home cooking scattered here and there for illustration of principles.
This book would make a handy kitchen reference. Want to know the different cooking and nutritional properties of various oils? Check the tables found in this book. Trying to choose some new cookware for your kitchen? Read this book, and you'll learn why professional chefs prefer stainless steel pots with copper bottoms for many kitchen tasks. A few topics are covered superficially, such as vegetarian diets, where the author notes that vegetarians can get all essential amino acids through combining different foods at meals, but he doesn't note that getting enough vitamin B12 while avoiding animal products requires extra effort. While most of the information is up-to-date, perhaps a few articles could do with some revisions, such as the entry on taste buds, in which Hillman describes the old theory on the zone distribution of taste buds, which recent research has put into question.
 great help November 9, 2006
Full of a lot of good information for the home cook or chef. Helps to explain why things happan like they do. Helps know some things you may want to change to get the results you want.
 Unsophisticated April 12, 2005
15 out of 25 found this review helpful
Every book has an intended audience, and if you have a college education - or just enjoyed high school science, and read pop science magazines - then you're probably not in the target group this author aims at.
Despite the glowing reviews it receives from some others, I felt the book dealt with the topics on a high-school "Mr. Science" level, when I was hoping for someone with at least Alton Brown's intelligence.
Very Good Introduction to Kitchen Lore. Not Best Science January 7, 2005
27 out of 29 found this review helpful
`The New Kitchen Science' by culinary journalist Howard Hillman is a new edition of a 20 year old book which uses the question and answer format common to a lot of cooking advice books. One small problem is that this format is not the best approach to presenting `science' in that science is a body of theories and explained phenomena the understanding of which facilitates applying knowledge to understanding new situations. So, if a book just answers questions, the ability to extend the answers to new situations may not be as good as other expository approaches. That said, I have to say that like Robert L. Wolke's `What Einstein told His Chef', this book may be more accessible to many readers than other conventional writers on the subject such as Harold McGee's works and `The Science of Cooking' by Bristol University (UK) don Peter Barham.
One thing a widely read foodie may want to consider is that they may have already seen most of the material in this book in the volumes cited above. This is not to say this book does not contain some new material, but a devoted reader of Shirley Corriher and Alton Brown may find this new material a bit sparse.
For the reader with little experience with food science reading, I caution you that there are some statements in this book, which are scientifically incorrect. This may be a small point, since the errors are not likely to interfere with your practical cooking, but they may interfere with your ability to extend your knowledge to new situations, which is the whole point of the scientific inquiry in the first place. The first error I noticed is the statement that when a water / alcohol mixture is boiled, the alcohol will all boil off, leaving just water. One of the first things a freshman chemistry student learns is that this is not true. It is true that more alcohol will evaporate than water, until the alcohol and water attain equilibrium. Admittedly, the alcohol will be reduced to a very small level, but it is still there. This is important if someone has physical or religious problems with any alcohol. The second error I noticed is the use of the term `dissolved' when referring to the mixing of flour with water. The proper term here is `suspension', not `solution'. In some ways, this is a more serious error, as suspensions behave much differently than solutions, and the two states are pervasive in cooking techniques, so it is important to know the differences in behavior between the two states.
After all that nit picking, I can still recommend this as a really worthwhile source of information whereby one can improve your cooking, especially for the reasonable paperback price. One especially valuable feature of this book is the excellent bibliography which gives references for all the authors and works mentioned above except for Alton Brown, and a whole lot more.
If you really need to have fun with your reading about food science, I recommend `The Cook Book Decoder or Culinary Alchemy Explained' by retired Canadian professor of Chemistry, Arthur E. Grosser. This book has the added virtue of being great to pass food knowledge on to kids.
The claim to `science' in this book's title is a bit tarnished, but if you are new to foodie science, this book will give you lots of useful information and tell you how to avoid a lot of kitchen pitfalls.
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