The Flavor Equation: The Science of Great Cooking Explained in More Than 100 Essential Recipes

"This is a really good book. It’s Nik Sharma’s second. He also has a pretty popular blog called A Brown Table . For people who are familiar with Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat and The Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt , this is like a natural extension of that. It gets into food science and why things work the way they do and why things taste the way they do. Nik has a science background, so he’s very comfortable talking about everything from the temperatures at which egg protein sets, to the different chemicals that cause certain aromas or pigments. He has all these charts throughout the book that look a lot like things you might find in a science book , which I enjoy. Maybe that’s not for everyone, but I think anyone who wants to understand why food tastes and feels the way it does is really going to like this. It gets into those details in an approachable way. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There’s certainly something in here for everyone. If you feel your eyes starting to glaze over because you don’t feel you need to know the name of the chemicals that cause food to smell the way it does, that’s fine. You can take as much or as little from it as you want. Even if you do nothing but look at the recipes and the introductory notes, it’s enough. For each recipe he has a section called ‘the flavor approach’ that explains why certain ingredients are in there and what they do. So, if you want to know why a recipe is in there, it tells you. One of my colleagues said this book is especially great during the pandemic, when we’re all grocery shopping less because if you don’t have one ingredient, by understanding the concept behind it, you can substitute it with something else. She was making a collard green and chickpea stew which calls for tamarind, which she didn’t have and wasn’t going to run out and buy specially. But she had pomegranate molasses, which she knew from reading this book provides acid and brightness and was a good swap. So, it definitely helps you understand ingredients in ways that you can then swap them in easier. Obviously, if you make a recipe exactly the way Nik says, it’s going to be delicious. But it also helps you understand how to start taking things in your own direction. Yes. He breaks the book into chapters that address particular flavors, but also how food feels and its aromas. There’s a ‘bitterness’ chapter. There’s a ‘sweetness’ chapter. There’s lots of connections between what you read in the front material and what’s in the recipes. The introductory part of each chapter goes more in-depth into the different types of tastes and, at the end of each introductory part of the chapter, he has quick tips about using things in the kitchen—for instance, if you don’t want your apples to brown, use lemon juice. There are a lot of practical kitchen tips in there."