SciPop Talks!

In Dave Arnold's world, the shape of an ice cube, the sugars and acids in an apple, and the bubbles in a bottle of champagne are all ingredients to be measured, tested, and tweaked. Liquid Intelligence readers behind the counter and into the lab. There, Arnold and his collaborators investigate temperature, carbonation, sugar concentration, and acidity in search of ways to enhance classic cocktails and invent new ones that revolutionize your expectations about what a drink can look and taste like. Years of rigorous experimentation and study--botched attempts and inspired solutions--have yielded the recipes and techniques found in these pages. Featuring more than 120 recipes and nearly 450 color photographs, Liquid Intelligence begins with the simple--how ice forms and how to make crystal-clear cubes in your own freezer--and then progresses into advanced techniques like clarifying cloudy lime juice with enzymes, nitro-muddling fresh basil to prevent browning, and infusing vodka with coffee, orange, or peppercorns.

Not long after his son was born, Derek Brown decided to cut back on his drinking. But as a bartender, bar owner, and cocktail and spirits expert, he wanted do so using the techniques and expertise of mixology to create a new arsenal of libations that were sophisticated, satisfying, and tasty. Creating these drinks isn't as simple as removing the alcohol. No- and low-proof cocktails still have to be balanced and still have to be delicious, but they don't operate exactly like cocktails with alcohol. The drinks Brown presents in this book are meticulously choreographed around taste, texture, body, and piquancy to result in surprisingly complex 'adult beverages' minus the booze. Drawing on historical research, meticulous tweaking of classic cocktails to create lower-proof versions, and entirely new concoctions inspired by an evolved home bar, in this book, Derek shares sixty recipes for no- and low-proof cocktails, as well as a guide to the ingredients and equipment you need to imbibe in Mindful Mixology at home.

Every time you cook, you're trying to hit just 6 notes: richness, brightness, depth, heat, saltiness, and sweetness. These are the flavours that make our food sing. When you cook - and eat - you rely on a variety of senses and feelings - taste, sight, aroma, sound, mouthfeel, and emotion - to perceive these sensations. In this groundbreaking cookbook from Nik Sharma, author of acclaimed cookbook Season and the award-winning A Brown Table blog, we learn the simplest ways to play up any and all of these sensations for the most flavourful food. The compounds that cause these unique sensations are found in the simplest ingredients: lemons and limes, salt and pepper, pickles, cream, olive oil, and butter. These are the flavour-boosting building blocks on hand for splendid, simple cooking. Once home cooks learn how to evoke these sensations, they'll be able to make nearly anything delicious. The Flavour Equation presents an in-depth exploration of the science of taste, with more than 100 illustrations for visual learners. Here, too, are 125 go-to recipes for favourite dishes - curries, one-pot vegetarian mains, soups - for cooks of all skill levels, with a photo of almost every recipe, in Nik's trademark evocative and moody style. This is a hefty, must-own cookbook - the next Food Lab or Flavor Bible - perfect for curious cooks of all levels who are learning the basics, need best-of-their-class recipes, and want to take their cooking to the next level.

A pioneering exploration of olfaction that upsets settled notions of how the brain translates sensory information. Decades of cognition research have shown that external stimuli "spark" neural patterns in particular regions of the brain. This has fostered a view of the brain as a space that we can map: here the brain responds to faces, there it perceives a sensation in your left hand. But it turns out that the sense of smell--only recently attracting broader attention in neuroscience--doesn't work this way. A. S. Barwich asks a deceptively simple question: What does the nose tell the brain, and how does the brain understand it? Barwich interviews experts in neuroscience, psychology, chemistry, and perfumery in an effort to understand the biological mechanics and myriad meanings of odors. She argues that it is time to stop recycling ideas based on the paradigm of vision for the olfactory system. Scents are often fickle and boundless in comparison with visual images, and they do not line up with well-defined neural regions. Although olfaction remains a puzzle, Barwich proposes that what we know suggests the brain acts not only like a map but also as a measuring device, one that senses and processes simple and complex odors. Accounting for the sense of smell upsets theories of perception philosophers have developed. In their place, Smellosophy articulates a new model for understanding how the brain represents sensory information.