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Cooking a pie in the oven is always a delicate balancing act. You don’t want the pie to dry out and become tough. But under cooking is probably worse, with raw liquid filling being left in the pie. Imagine how…
How cold does your freezer need to be for freezing that piece of fish in less than 2 minutes? How fast does your cooling water need to flow to keep a pipe full of soup at temperature? If you’re designing…
Long before that steaming cup of (Turkish?) coffee stands in front of you, or even before you buy that bag of coffee beans, your coffee beans have been on quite a journey. From plant to farmer, to processor, and finally…
The more you learn about different cuisines, the more similarities you can see between them. So, when recently learning about brick pastry, which is a very thin dough cooked on a flat griddle, I quickly learned that a lot of…
Have you ever seen those profiteroles or cream puffs with a speckled decorated top? The pattern on top almost looks like dried out earth, with a lot of cracks and spaces in between the darker spots of decoration? Note only…
So many cuisines have dishes that are made with super thin pastry. The very thin dough can be used for making anything from Middle Eastern baklava, Greek spanokopita, German strudel to Indian samosas. They’re all made with phyllo, or the…
A rice pudding, isn’t that just a regular, simple dessert? Nothing special or fancy? After making a rice pudding the other day (for testing The Turkish Cookbook), and of course, making several steps along the way, I thought the contrary:…
There are a lot of different creams out these in the supermarket nowadays. An acidic sour cream to top a baked potato, a heavy whipping cream to top your apple pie and so many more. Clotted cream is yet another…
If you’re an avid follower of Masterchef Australia (as myself), you’re probably familiar with the ‘death dish’ (although it’s less of a death dish in the more recent seasons): risotto! On this cooking competition, more than one contestant has either…
Do you drink your coffee while walking, from a cup with a plastic lid on top (American), from a small espresso cup while standing at the bar (Italian) or do you take it slowly while sitting down, from a small…
What do you think the dish at the top of this photo consists of? Looks like chicken with rice to you? It does so to me as well! However, it is ‘chicken’, but, it’s vegetarian… Most of us know: we…
There are a lot of reasons people might not eat meat, ever or at certain times in their life. Religion might be your driver or a concern for animal welfare. Others might not eat meat because of allergies, health concerns…