Why Oxtail Is Perfect For Soup
For years I’d been making a family recipe for brown bean soup with a packet of dried oxtail soup, not thinking much about it. The soup always turned out great, with a lot of flavor. Never did I think twice…
Category Using ingredients
Once you start using food ingredients in your cooking, or your production process, all sorts of changes will happen to the ingredient. It may soften, change colour or thicken.
You might also be using an ingredient for a very specific role in your food. Why would you use sour cream in cakes for instance? Or why would you use a zucchini in that same cake?
All these posts focus on digging into what happens to a specific ingredient once you start using it and it’s fascinating science!
If you want to learn more specific details of ingredients, check out our posts on researching ingredients.
If you want to compare ingredients and know which one to choose for which application, we have a category for that too!
Previous step: all these ingredients started out at a farm!
Why Does Popcorn Pop? – Popcorn Science
Whenever you’re popping corn, whether it’s in a microwave, or on the stovetop, your ears play a crucial role. At the start, the kernels are quiet, not a lot of going on and at some point, your start hearing popping…
Why Would You Use Black Beans in Brownies?
Always looking for a new experiment, I decided to try my hand at some black bean brownies the other day. Looking for a fun variation on brownies, and having some left-over sweet potato, I ended up making sweet potato-black bean…
How to Make Oat Milk Pancakes
Just because you are allergic to milk, use less dairy milk out of concern for the environment doesn’t mean you can’t eat pancakes anymore! It so happens, pancakes don’t really need (cow’s) milk. They’re actually very flexible regarding the type…
Why Carrots Are Used in Cake (& Carrot Walnut Cake Recipe)
Not that many years ago, my only reference to carrot cake was a Dutch joke. It involved a baker and a rabbit, who does not like carrot cake, though makes the baker think he does. In all honesty, a carrot…
Should You Rinse Rice? – The Science of Cooking Rice
Once you’ve decided which of the many rice dishes you want to cook and once you’ve decided which specific rice variety to use, you’ve got another decision to make. How to cook your rice? And, just as importantly, should you…
How to Use Starch Thickening Agents for Baking
This is a guest post by Karen Rutherford founder and editor-in-chief at the Cakedecorist. I was making cheesecake the other day and thought it could do with a strawberry sauce on top. So, I set out to boil down my…
How Baker’s Yeast Is Made & Which Type to Use
If you have your own sourdough starter, kept alive by carefully feeding it on a regular basis, you are growing your own micro organisms. Micro organisms are all around us, in the air and on most surfaces. In most cases…
Apple pie – It’s all about the apple (science)!
There are tons and tons of recipes for apple pie (such as our Dutch one). They use different crusts, different ingredient ratios, maybe some additional add-ons. There’s so much to choose from. However, most of these recipes fail to mention…
Why and How Sour Cream Is Used in Cakes (+ Recipe)
You can make a cake with very few ingredients, equal amounts of flour, butter, eggs and sugar will give you a delicious pound cake. However, you can tweak the flavour and texture of your cake in an unlimited number of…
Why Shrimp Change Color and Shape During Cooking
There is a very easy way to distinguish a fresh uncooked shrimp from a cooked one: its colour. If you’ve ever cooked shrimp before, you will have noticed this colour transformation. The shrimp will convert from a blue, translucent colour…
Comparing 5 ways to prepare broccoli – Broccoli science
Kale leaves shrink when they’re cooked, eggplants turn into a delicious mush and pumpkins can be transformed into a rich puree. Broccoli on the other hand doesn’t change size at all when cooked. It will still be a stem with…