Cooking For Engineers®

Recently, I received a wireless thermometer from Thermoworks to try out. Their newest product is called Smoke and is specifically designed to help people barbecue and smoke food at home. Smoke has two parts - a base unit (which takes two of Thermoworks standardized Pro-Series probes) and a wireless receiver unit - which lets the user track the air temperature and the food temperature without going outside to the smoker.
Thermoworks is selling the Smoke at $99 and this would definitely welcome tool for anyone who likes to slow cook food outside.

These days when I reach for a spatula to turn food in a pan, I've been finding myself grabbing the GastroMax Slotted Turner more often than not. Tina bought this spatula for me after months (or maybe years) of listening to me complain about our various spatulas. After buying the GastroMax Turner, my complaining has stopped.

Having a fundamental understanding of what is going on in the kitchen can not only help you avoid disasters but also assist in making the right decision the first time you try out a recipe or wing it. Understanding how heat transfer affects your cooking is a first step in realizing why we'd choose a particular cooking implement or specific heating method (steaming vs. baking, frying vs. boiling) for one dish but not another. In this article, Burr Zimmerman describes how heat transfer works as it relates to cooking.
Burr Zimmerman has 11 years of (amateur) cooking experience, 9 years of chemical engineering experience, and 7 of trying to combine them.

In 2005, a family owned business headed by inventor Larry Mackiewicz started to sell a tabletop cooling device called the CoolCover. The problem it solved was straightforward: how do you serve foods that should be chilled? The traditional answer to that problem is often unattractive and messy. Fill a large tub with crushed ice and place the chilled food in the ice. For foods that need to be kept below 40°F, the ice method is still the best around, but for foods that only need to be served chilled or kept lower than the ambient temperature, the CoolCover is certainly one of the better solutions.