Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Thinking about it, would a "How To Cook For Hackers" video / ebook / webseries be of use or interest to HN? What's the hacker angle on cooking? In my experience, cooking is much more of a craft than an intellectual exercise, which doesn't make it very 'hackable'. Personally, I'd recommend start with something like these [1][2] - good, fast, cheap, nutritious food has been focus for many others than hackers, for qui…
There are three angles on cooking that I don't find in standard recipe books: 1. The structure of cooking. A lot of recipes share common patterns, but in recipe books they are presented as individual recipes rather than as modular building blocks and techniques. 2. A scientific approach to cooking. By this I do not mean a description of the chemistry, but rather a more experimental approach and a focus on verifying c…
The reason you sear steak is to cause what are known as the "Mailliard reactions", a complex waterfall series of reactions that happen when you expose meat proteins to temperatures over 140C. That decomposes the surface of the meat into a very complex collection of extremely tasty aromatic compounds (including some of the compounds responsible for the taste of coffee and chocolate).
If you're interested in this sort of thing, a) the experiments have already been done, b) I recommend Harold McGee's "On Food And Cooking" as a solid starting point. "America's Test Kitchen" is also good.
This is also the kind of thing I was thinking could be covered in a "Cooking for Hackers" series.