This week’s most interesting book was difficult to choose- not because of any subject matter preferences but because there were just so many intriguing books that came in this week!  I’ve had to triple the display space for New Books!  Anyway, this book won the slightly prestigious honor of being book of the week because it interested nearly every person who has walked by it in the last two days. What is so interesting about it, you ask?

The Kitchen as Laboratory presents to the reader a new way to think about and experience food and cooking.  Quite simply, the authors are explaining and exploring the idea of  science-based cooking.  This is cooking based on understandings of a food’s chemical and physcial structure. Flavors and textures of food serve as guides that are paired together not by means of traditional recipes, but through what science says would taste good together. Seem radical?  That’s because it is!

Offering both scientific explanations of the concepts of scientific cooking and recipes to demonstrate the principles, this book is unique.  It’s composed of 33 essays written by scholars, chefs, and scientists from across the globe who are interested in furthering the discourse about the possibilities of a new type of cooking, one that is only just starting to be explored in the hallowed kitchens of the world’s elite cooking schools.

So, in the end, The Kitchen as Laboratory is our book of the week because it so wonderfully addresses a 21st century idea- treat even the everyday with creativity and be amazed.