Hungry Scientist

One of us is cooped up in the house with a busted foot (a cracked navicular, to be exact), and, with a whole lotta time on her hands, is experimenting with fruits, vegetables, and acetic acid, starting a line of homemade pickled presents to fit within a recession-era gift-giving budget.
The apartment reeks of hot vinegar [...]

Watch Patrick on NPR’s Science Friday making carbonated fruit. Also listen to Andrea Seabrook interview the two of us on Weekend All Things Considered.

On a recent exploratory foray through Soho, we stumbled on the candy store Papabubble. Their shtick—demonstrating candy-making in an exquisitely minimalist shop—might be a euro-touristy gimmick, but we still swooned for the beakers, sugar, and stainless steel. A lass kneaded a hot log of sugar back and forth to cool it and snipped its tail [...]

The Hungry Scientist packed up the labs and headed into the woods north of Canada for our first hunting excursion. New Brunswick on the Cains river where Atlantic salmon spawn and wild birds nest.
Backwoods cooking is always fun and we have had an interest in it since learning the knack from beloved Keewaydin Camp days. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River [...]

One of the very first projects that we developed for our book was an electric candle cake. We tried several different materials and methods for creating edible circuitry: gold leaf (from Goldschlager), electrolyte-saturated sports-drink-powder, even nontoxic electrode pad gel (YUCK), then finally, edible silver foil. This atomically thin silver leaf is traditionally used as a [...]

Hungry Scientist arrived in Florence yesterday and has already come across some curious food stuffs.
Duff Love: That’s right, Homer Simpson’s favorite brew is here in Florence! Was it Springfield or Florence that had it first? Don’t know. Did the original Homer drink Duff while he wrote the Odyssey?

Power Fruit: Caught this by chance as I [...]

I am a big fan of Skor bars. I bought one at a gas station the other day and found that instead of that nice chocolate brown color it had turned completely white. I grabbed another bar from the same box, unwrapped it, and found the color you would expect—a nice chocolate brown. Considering that [...]

No, not grape juice… Vino! Made with our very own hands. This past weekend the Hungry Scientist Horde headed to Healdsburg, CA, to crush the fine syrah grapes of that heavenly valley. We filled seven or eight big garbage cans with grapes, fed them through an auger to destem them, and dumped what remained into [...]