This article explains what caramelization is and how to use it to enhance your cooking.

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I like baking breads, so I found McGee’s paragraph about yeast’s chemical reaction interesting.
Yeast is a single-celled fungus, and comes in many species.  The one used for baking and brewing is usually Saccharomyces cerevisiae.  When baking a loaf of bread, enzymes in the flour break down the starch of the flour into the sugars glucose, [...]

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When I first started cooking, I read in a cookbook that unless you’re able to get tomatoes at their peak of freshness in season, it’s better to buy them canned.  I was surprised, as I had always assumed that fresh produce tasted better.  The book explained that canned tomatoes were always picked at the peak [...]

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I cooked dried beans for the first time a few nights ago (for burritos), so I wanted to find out what you really need to do to cook beans. Some people claim you have to soak them overnight, others say don’t bother, while some say soaking just reduces the flatulence effect. To get [...]

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Cell walls are the outside layer of a cell, and are composed partly of cellulose, a rigid material, and partly of a soft, water/carbohydrate/mineral/protein mixture.  In your fruits and vegetables, this softer mixture of materials helps bind cell walls to other cell walls, with cellulose as reinforcement, which allows plants to grow and use to [...]

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