How to Defrost a Turkey and Other Food-Science Thanksgiving Mysteries
The holidays are coming up and all of a sudden everyone is a food scientist and knows all about tryptophan, proper turkey thawing, the best raw ingredients to use for pumpkin pie, and the accuracy of pop-up thermometers. Will the real chefs and culinologists please stand up? It is your job to stop the false rumors and annoyingly educate your ...

Street Food, Take 2
Back in 1981, my dad informed the family that we were all moving to Africa. I was only 8, so it was no big deal to leave sleepy, boring Framingham, MA and move to Liberia, West Africa. Of course, what sticks in my mind most from those days was the food. Every day we would walk through the villages on ...

Reporting Live From the CIA Worlds of Flavor Conference, Part 1
Forgive me fans, I have sinned... It’s been 4 months since my last trade show! The last time I saw a vendor booth was on July 26 at the PMA produce show in Monterey! What happened!!! Well, I gave in to the pressures of the world and began working at a job that involved lots of co-packers, plant trials, steel-toe ...

We Are All Bacterio-Sapians
Way back in 1991, my college friends and I drove to Washington D.C. (a typical college road trip). I was not quite a food scientist yet, but I knew that Washington was where the FDA lived and it was an important organization that I would probably need to know more about in my future. I walked for miles trying to ...

The Science Behind Flavor
In the 19th century a German chemistry professor named Adolf Brix figured out how to measure the density of plant juice by floating a hydrometer in it. Flash-forward to 2009 and that chemistry professor has a restaurant named after him in Napa Valley. But, of course, there was a whole lot more that went on in between his discovery and ...