I took a trip to my local university library once and found the food science section. It made On Food and Cooking look like Green Eggs and Ham in comparison and I learned more than I cared to about pineapple canning.

(To be fair, McGee’s work does exactly what I did but with multiple orders of magnitude more effort: summarizing food science journal papers into single paragraphs.)

One thing that’s always struck me as fun about cooking as a science is that your reagents need to be live calibrated by look and feel. Want to use the right amount of cyder vinegar but it’s from a brand / manufacturer you don’t know? You’re going to have to live titrate it with your mouth!

Don’t even get me started on inconsistencies between egg manufacturers. Clara’s lecithin content seems to be at least 10% stronger than Number 4’s, and she is also more tolerant of being stroked.

Those egg manufacturers can be temperamental, eh? Perhaps Clara’s found some midnight snacks somewhere. I know mine got rodents every now and then to supplement the feed, but I never measured lecithin content on the, uh, production output.

This is ubiquitous in baking at least. Also in confectionery where phase changes and structures are important (the canonical example being tempering). The extreme is probably Modernist cuisine.

You can look at the book "ratio" which presents a small number of standard recipes as proportions, with some hints for modification. I'd also recommend Lateral Cooking which describes recipes in terms of spectrums of ingredient variation or addition, usually starting with the simplest form. Finally there's a lot of interest in physics for coffee brewing, particularly pourover, but I'm somewhat skeptical of the rigour in that field and how much of it translates to better tasting cups.

Let me linkbot those books and authors:

Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking by Michael Ruhlman, 2010, ISBN 978-1416571728 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Ratio/Michael-Ruhlman... . There's also a mixed-drinks companion book from 2023, The Book of Cocktail Ratios: The Surprising Simplicity of Classic Cocktails with ISBN 978-1668003398: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Book-of-Cocktail-...

https://ruhlman.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ruhlman

Lateral Cooking: One Dish Leads to Another by Niki Segnit, 2019, ISBN 978-1635572643 (978-1635572643 US ed.) https://www.nikisegnit.com/lateral-cooking . Seems to lean on Segnit's prevous book, 2010's The Flavour Thesaurus, ISBN 978-0747599777 (978-1608198740 2012 US ed.): https://www.nikisegnit.com/the-flavour-thesaurus .

To add: The Physics of Filter Coffee: https://www.scottrao.com/products/physics-of-filter-coffee-j..., 2021 ISBN 978-0578246086

https://coffeeadastra.com/

Far as I can tell, Jonathan Gagné doesn't have a dedicated page on his website, it's hosted by Scott Rao. His blog does have a lot of interesting experimental work on the physics which led to the book. As I mentioned, I think this is an interesting academic piece which is at least supplemented by some genuine research. In practice, I feel like getting better pourover is 90% about finding beans that you like, buying a quality grinder and using them while fresh.

For confectionery, Chocolates and Confections (Greweling, Culinary Institute of America), 2013, ISBN 978-1-118-76467-1 is a fun book. It's quite pricey but you can pick up used copies now and again. It's a technical book and requires a lot of equipment that the average home cook doesn't have, but I would consider it fairly authoritative for looking up how chocolate things are made (and even discusses considerations for setting up a business). Most CIA books are pretty good on the practical side and they tend to be very exact with ingredients (almost always by weight).

https://www.wiley.com/en-gb/Chocolates+and+Confections%3A+Fo...

Your comment is probably tongue in cheek, but this level of detail is pretty standard for advanced cooking. Serious Eats, Chef Steps or What’s Eating Dan have published loads of recipes backed up by research and accompanied by great graphs.

> this level of detail is pretty standard for advanced cooking

Cooking so advanced you need a fat wallet hehe

I can't speak for the others, but Serious Eats tends to be more of a "skip the silly gadgets, just use a knife" sort of place.

Huh? Serious Eats is a free website, so is Kenji's YouTube channel

Science and empiricism usually eventually wins out over the long term but thankfully for human civilisation, people have been able to achieve extremely good outcomes in things with very loose models and folk wisdom - for instance sports people don't need to understand physics to "Bend it like Beckham"

In cooking, the folklore knew that salting your egg mix before beating an omelette long before Chemistry could catch up and explain it. In the meantime all the cynics were making worse omelettes

I'm not sure most cookbooks claim to offer an optimal recipe or even that there is an optimal one and that preference may play a big role. Some sites like serious eats do more investigation but I agree, I really like the phase diagram approach. Seems to best apply for stabilized colloids (mayo, ice cream, vinaigrettes, etc).

As the paper says:

A true Italian grandmother or a skilled home chef from Rome would never need a scientific recipe for Cacio and pepe, relying instead on instinct and years of experience.

What about replacing other charts?

The equivalent in amateur aviation? "Instinct and years of experience replace..."

Well, I am neither an italian grandmother nor a skilled home chef so I don't care.

Can we rent a nonna?

The Recipe section is mostly to show the problem is solved

> small temperature variations can completely compromise the recipe’s outcome

lol “optimal sauce” is such an HN approach to describing good food