Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Cooking for Geeks

Jeff Potter from Cooking for Geeks (link) visited Carnegie Mellon yesterday as part of a tour to promote his new book. Aside from an excellent talk covering some neat topics about cooking/baking (e.g., using a 48-hour warm water bath to cook meatloaf), the audience was witness to ice cream made using liquid nitrogen.

With a boiling point of roughly -195.8 Celsius, liquid nitrogen provides a significantly faster, albeit a little dangerous, way to make ice cream. On top of this, both the cream and water in the ice cream-to-be freeze significantly faster than normal, creating smaller crystalline structures and a smoother texture overall. Pretty cool.



Here is a short video of the ice cream demonstration (liquid nitrogen use begins at 2:45). Here's a link to his book.

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