My educational background is in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and I enjoy exploring the world of food from a scientific and analytic perspective. I also enjoy things that are delicious. Since I was a young boy I have been reasonably good at cooking. I had the good fortune to learn about it from my father, mother, and grandmother as they let me cook alongside them and pick up knowledge like a hungry sponge. I had a lot of fun making dishes and trying new things. I was always "that kid" who would eat adventurous foods at restaurants, be it escargots or fish roe. I like to say that I'll try almost anything at least once.

Where things turned the corner for me was in my twenties. I started reading books like "On Food and Cooking" by Harold McGee and "Cooking for Geeks" by Jeff Potter. Through trial and error, I had learned to be an adept cook, but there was a lot of gray area as to why things were working out, or why they may have failed. Getting an education into the food science details of the progression of protein denaturation as food goes through the process of cooking and temperatures where Maillard reactions occur opened a whole new world to me. Now it was clear what was actually happening as my steak went from raw to rare to medium rare to less favorable levels of "doneness". In short, denaturing myosin was favorable, while denaturing actin is not. Maillard reactions explain why delicious browning can occur at certain temperatures and not at others. Finally oven temperatures started to make sense: they were either avoiding browning, encouraging it, or going for full-on caramelization. The more I learned about the science underpinning everyday cooking, the more interesting it all became, and the better the results were of my cooking experiments. It amazed me how something that is done by almost everyone on a regular basis is truly understood by a relative few. Food is fascinating.

Since that time I've built my own sous vide controller from a microcontroller and a crock pot (now replaced with an immersion circulator), made my own sauerkraut, yogurt, and other lactofermented foods, brewed my own beer, and experimented with dehydration to preserve fruits and make jerky. It has been a lot of fun, and I have set up this site as a way to remember some of the things I have done, and to share those things with others.

Thanks for stopping by and bon appetit.