Culinary Bio

When you're cooking, you're a chemist! Every time you follow or modify a recipe you are experimenting with acids and bases, emulsions and suspensions, gels and foams. In your kitchen you denature proteins, crystallize compounds, react enzymes with substrates, and nurture desired microbial life while suppressing harmful microbes. And unlike in a laboratory, you can eat your experiments to verify your hypotheses.

A shadowy master criminal has been kidnapping experts from the food industry and stealing both food and equipment. The crimes are so unrelated no one in the world had noticed the connections. No one except Albert Smith, that is. He’s got almost nothing to go on, but with every place he visits, he gets just a little closer to the truth. He’s not working alone though, his faithful sidekick, Rex Harrison the former police dog is right there with him. Can the two of them pull off the impossible and find the man Albert chose to dub ‘the Gastrothief’?

In Ruth Reichl’s latest book — one that will delight her fans and convert those as yet uninitiated to her charming tales — the author brings to life her adventures in pursuit of good meals and good company. Picking up where Tender at the Bone leaves off, Comfort Me with Apples recounts...

This book will appeal to foodies and those who are deprived of cookbooks in audio format. Molecular Gastronomy documents the sensory phenomena of eating and uses basic physics to put to bed many culinary myths. This audiobook presents pieces of conventional wisdom - such as whether it is better to make a stock by placing meat in already boiling water, or water before it is boiled - and gives its history before making scientific pronouncements.

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME The back must slave to feed the belly. . . . In this urgent and unique book, chef Michael Gibney uses twenty-four hours to animate the intricate camaraderie and culinary choreography in an upscale New York restaurant kitchen. Here...

At an early age, Ruth Reichl discovered that "food could be a way of making sense of the world. . . . If you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were." Her deliciously crafted memoir, Tender at the Bone, is the story of a life determined, enhanced, and defined in equal...

JAMES BEARD AWARD NOMINEE NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY VOGUE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “One of the great culinary stories of our time.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times It begins with a simple ritual: Every Saturday afternoon, a boy who loves to cook walks...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Hailed by Anthony Bourdain as “heartbreaking, horrifying, poignant, and inspiring,” 32 Yolks is the brave and affecting coming-of-age story about the making of a French chef, from the culinary icon behind the renowned New York City restaurant Le Bernardin. NAMED...

Finalist for the Washington State Book Award From the award-winning author of The Mushroom Hunters comes the story of an iconic fish, perhaps the last great wild food: salmon. For some, a salmon evokes the distant wild, thrashing in the jaws of a hungry grizzly bear on TV. For others...