Rating: 
Summary: Great Book
Review: Recipes and the science behind them and more! Very interesting read.
Rating: 
Summary: Got McGee
Review: Robert Wolke seems to mean well. He tries to present some basic science at a 3rd grade level and connect it to food. But by limiting himself to 3rd graders, his text becomes wordy and tedious. An author writing for foodies might have decided to keep the science in the background and focus on food. Wolke is better at this, but he is far more interested in what he can say about food than about tasting it.If you are interested in food and science, Wolke's book is gruel to Harold McGee's miche.
Rating: 
Summary: Dispelling the Myths
Review: There are two things I really love (well more than two but they don't necessarily relate to this topic) - cooking and details, details, details. And this book gives me alot of both. Actually when I first went out to look for a cooking book I was looking for a recognized, technical reference like the Culinary Institute of America's Professional Chef or the Cordon Bleu School of Cooking Techniques. I can cook up a storm but I feel like some of my most basic understandings of cooking could use some improvement. I can create many recipies from experience but I don't understand or know all of the classic methods. However while looking through those reference books I came across Robert Wolke's Einstein book. Seeing it twigged a distant memory of hearing about it on the radio. And as I thumbed through the book I was torn between it and one of the classic reference books I was considering. But economic restrictions wouldn't allow me to purchase both. So my morbid curiousity for details guided me to buying this book. I am not dissapointed. It is a wonderful resource of little known facts and descriptions of the chemistry of cooking. A term I often use. It has really added to my understanding of blending flavors and combining foods and cooking techniques. But it is also fun and eady to read. There is one downfall I can see for other readers and that is the way in which in dispells well known and oft used kitchen myths. For some readers it could be like finding out Santa or the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny don't exist. But that's all part of growing up isn't it? So perhaps you can think of this book as a step towards culinary maturity. I highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Couldn't put it Down
Review: This "technical" book on the science of cooking (it's not really an art you know - the art is in the presentation, not the preparation) answers even the questions I had forgotten to ask. Anyone with an interest in improving his/her talents for handling and preparing food should read this text. I had a very difficult time putting it down. Admittedly, the opening chapters may be a bit difficult to struggle through. However, as I progressed through the question/answer format, my fascination increased with each chapter. When I finished it, I wished there were more of it to read.
Rating:
Summary: Couldn't put it Down
Review: This "technical" book on the science of cooking (it's not really an art you know - the art is in the presentation, not the preparation) answers even the questions I had forgotten to ask. Anyone with an interest in improving his/her talents for handling and preparing food should read this text. I had a very difficult time putting it down. Admittedly, the opening chapters may be a bit difficult to struggle through. However, as I progressed through the question/answer format, my fascination increased with each chapter. When I finished it, I wished there were more of it to read.
Rating: 
Summary: What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained
Review: This book has interesting information about the oddities of cooking but not the basic science of everyday foods. I was a little disappointed. I was looking for the answers for why dishes didn't work out technically and this book couldn't answer those questions.
Rating:
Summary: Great -- and in short, quick bursts...
Review: This book is a culmination of articles written on kitchen science. None of them will take more than a few minutes to read -- but are packed with fascinating information. All are written with great humor, which makes all of the information palatable. Why does it take longer to cook at altitude?
What is the difference between baking powder and baking soda (and why are they used?)
Does the massive amount of soda/beer drinking contribute to global warming?
Does hot water freeze more quickly in the freezer?
Why could lasagna eat a hole in the aluminum foil?
Why are foods sweet?
What are sweeteners made of...?
What is the difference between all the salts on the market? And many many more...
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting, but totally pedestrian and unprofessional
Review: This book is a great idea poorly executed. If you have a college education and a sense of humor that transcends pop culture, I suggest you look elsewhere for good reading. The book is written in the all-too-common short-section format, popular with the attention-span impaired, and the ideas are wedged between Wolke's loquacious commentary (which, by the way, teaches you nothing). However, there are some interesting tidbits, if you are willing to mine a ton of ore to get the ounce of gold. Furthermore, although the author is clearly not condescending, he is informal to a fault, leaving the reader with rhetorical questions where there should be answers-raising the question: was this book even edited? Take more than a cursory look in the bookstore before paying the exorbitant price for this pedestrian work, and, if you have curiosities about science and food, look to Alton Brown of "Good Eats" fame-he gets it right where Wolke just gets clueless.
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining, Accurate Application of Science to Cooking
Review: This book is about what science can tell us about working with food. It is one answer to my wish that every TV chef who is attempting to teach cooking to us foodies take a two semester course in chemistry. The book is not a rigorous approach to the chemistry of sugars, salt, fats, chemical leavenings, heat, acids, bases, and the like. Rather, it is a collection of enhanced answers to questions posed to the author in a regular newspaper column. This makes the book more interesting to read, if a little less available as a resource to applying its teachings to new situations. The second chapter on salt is a perfect example of the kind of misunderstandings this book clears up. More than one TV chef (and more than one cookbook author) has spoken at great length about differences in salt, giving one the impression that there is a basic difference between table salt, kosher salt, and sea salt. There is, of course, a difference, but that difference is based almost entirely on the physical differences, akin to the difference between liquid and frozen water. All salt is sodium chloride. By weight, no type of salt gives a saltier result than another. The very small additional differences between, say, kosher salt and sea salt are in the presence of incredibly small quantities minerals in addition to sodium chloride. Even differences in taste may be due to the differences in physical form. I have a sense that these considerations may be just a little too subtle to be worth all this fuss. I'm inclined to agree, until it occurs to me that if someone hears a statement that 'kosher salt' is less salty than table salt, they may use this as a reason to use more kosher salt and ignore the evidence of their senses that they are indeed eating a lot of salt. This becomes significant if one must lower their intake of sodium chloride. This book addresses many such confusions, and addresses them accurately and persuasively. It does this so well that Alton Brown wishes he would have written this book. My suggestion to Alton Brown is that with the lesson of this book, he would be able to do a better job of it. I may be stepping on an intellectual land mine here since I have not yet read Shirley Corriher's book 'Cookwise' so I do not know if she has already been over this territory, but here goes. I think the definitive book on food science for the masses has not been written yet. This book covers many of the right topics and I found no inaccuracies in the science. But, the book suffers from being a collection of edited columns. Science is about theories explaining facts. For example, a full explanation of salt would involve a discussion of what a salt is, in general, and use this information to show, among other things, why salt is dangerous to people with hypertension and how chemicals other than table salt can influence body fluid volume in hypertensives. A scientific discussion would extend the notion of salts to what it means to dissolve a salt in water. By doing so, it would clear up the most seriously abused work in cooking explanations. That word is 'dissolve' and it's various past, past perfect and pluperfect tenses. Almost every culinary demonstrator on TV and many writers in cookbooks misuse the term dissolve by applying it to the very different operations of creating an emulsion, melting, and creating a colloid. I think what I am really recommending as some future Alton Brown project is a book that combines physics, chemistry, and physiology to give an UNDERSTANDING of food, cooking, and health. Understanding is the real goal of science, so that one can apply what one knows in one situation to cooking food in other situations. Strange as it may seem, this is an almost perfect characterization of what Herr Brown believes he is doing. The subtitle of this book, 'Kitchen Science Explained' is a perfect representation of how this book is not science itself, but the carrying of science to the 'gentiles'. In itself, the title is a redundancy, since science itself is explanation incarnate. This is a very good book. I found no errors (I was a professional chemist, so I would probably have found really bad errors if there were any) in science. I believe the writing is lucid and entertaining. I believe the author is always intellectually honest in saying when either he does not know the answer or if science in general does not yet have an explanation. The only point of my ranting is that this is not the ideal book on food science which bridges the gap between the research of Harold McGee and the practical worlds of Alton Brown and Shirley Corriher. A book that comes a lot closer to this goal is McGee's book, 'The Curious Cook'. I recommend this book to anyone with any curiosity about food. Excellent reading even if you don't cook.
Rating:
Summary: Delicious Brew of Cooking and Chemistry
Review: This book looks at some of the main issues (and ingredients) relating to food and cooking from the perspective of science. The author, chemistry professor and popular food writer, explores some of the more 'controversial' ingredients such as sugar, salt, fat, and other chemicals used in the kitchen and their known effects on us. He also answers (or at least makes a good attempt to answer) some of the nagging questions about food and its preparation, such as microwave issues and MSG. Lots of not-always-useful-but-interesting tidbits (pardon the pun) are also thrown in, like the answers to "can eggs be frozen?" or even "what do you do with the wine cork when the waiter gives it to you?" to spice things up. While the explanations in the book are scientific and accurate, they are written in an accessible and entertaining way. Minimal chemistry knowledge is required. A great book for anyone who eats. Better still for anyone who cooks.
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