The Curious Cook Book

Acknowledgments.
Introduction.
PART ONE: Playing with Food: Experiments.
1. The Searing Truth: Cooking always squeezes out meat juices.
2. Oil Drops Keep Falling on My Toque: The fate of spatter from the frying pan.
3. Simmering Down: Cooking tender meats well below the boil.
4. The Green and the Brown: How to keep the green color of salads and sauces.
5. Taking the Wind Out of the Sunroot: Making the Jerusalem artichoke more digestible.
6. Beurre Blanc: Butter's Undoing: A sauce made by transforming butter back into cream.
7. Simplifying Hollandaise and Béarnaise: Properly understood, these sauces almost make themselves.
8. Mayonnaise: Doing More with Lecithin: Mayonnaise can be made with little or no egg yolk.
9. Persimmons Unpuckered: Updating ancient Chinese methods of artificial ripening.
10. Fruit Ices, Cold and Calculated: Three dozen fruits, five styles.
11. The Pleasures of Merely Measuring: Prowling the kitchen with thermometer and stopwatch.
PART TWO: Making the Good Life Better.
12. Fat and the Heart: Coping with quirky biology.
13. Food and Cancer: Learning how to improve our odds.
14. Minding the Pots and Pans: The Case of Aluminum: No metal surface is inert.
PART THREE: Reflections.
15. The Physiologist of Taste: Science in Brillat-Savarin's classic.
16. The Saga of Osmazome: The early chemistry of gastronomical pleasure.
17. From Raw to Cooked: The Transformation of Flavor: Why does the human animal like cooked foods?
Appendix.
Bibliography.
Index.