Learn the science behind:
Don’t understand why a specific ingredient is a part of your recipe? Have no clue how to handle an ingredient? Or are you curious as to what happens to an ingredient in your application?
Then these posts are written for you! For a wide range of ingredients we investigate why they’re used (e.g. why add sour cream or zucchini to a cake), and just what they do in your application.
Knowing this will put you in a great spot for determining substitutions, whether it’s because of diet, costs, or availability of ingredients. We believe understanding your ingredients is the key to good cooking and food manufacturing!
Previous step: all these ingredients started out at a farm!
If you want to bake something with an orange flavour, recipes will more often than not, not use orange juice. Instead, you will use orange zest (or both). But why is that the case? That orange zest is actually packed…
This is a guest post by Morgan Walker Clarke. Morgan is from Dallas, Texas, works in the hospitality industry and has an interest for food and science that he loves to share with us! Using enzymes in baking is not…
Ever made your own stock, stored it in your fridge overnight and ended up with a jelly instead of liquid? Ever made a wobbly sweet, soft panna cotta that only just sets in the fridge? Or made a shiny, thin…
Have you ever wonder why you can pull pulled pork into a lot of tiny strands? Why it’s so different from a quickly grilled pork chop? Why it isn’t tough, but soft and tender (despite having been cooked for hours)?…
Every year, around the American Thanksgiving holiday, the internet seems to be full of cranberries again. We’ve looked at these native to North America fruits before, when using a flavour pairing tool to determine that they work great with brie…
Whenever we make butter chicken, or just tandoori chicken, we marinate the meat in yogurt. Even though it is only in the marinade for 30 minutes or so, it makes the meat beautifully soft and tender. If you leave it…
My ice cream skills and knowledge have been increasing steadily ever since buying ‘Hello, my name is ice cream‘ and practicing ice cream making in our ice cream machine. The other day, I tested yet another recipe from the book,…
If you’ve made both flour-based flatbreads, such as chapati or tortillas, as well as corn-based corn tortillas. You’ll have noticed that the two doughs behave very differently. The corn-based tortilla isn’t as stretchy and can’t be rolled out as easily.…
Long before kale was a super food, and a real hit in foodie land, we Dutch used to eat it all the time during the winter months. We’d use it to make ‘boerenkoolstamppot’ which is mashed potatoes mixed with lightly…
Ever seen a blueberry pancake recipe and transferred it into a banana one? Or saw this cool new cake flavour that you applied on ice cream? A lot of product and recipe development starts this way. You see an interesting…
One of the challenges of homemade ice cream is to make the ice cream scoopable, straight from the freezer. Often, ice creams tend to become really hard in the freezer, requiring either patience, or a microwave (30s at 360W) to…
Carrots are orange, aren’t they? No, not necessarily! Purple and yellow carrots are a relatively new variation of carrots in our supermarket (at least in my perception, until I found out it’s actually the purple ones that were there before…