Cooking For Engineers®

Recently, I received a wireless thermometer from Thermoworks to try out. Their newest product is called Smoke and is specifically designed to help people barbecue and smoke food at home. Smoke has two parts - a base unit (which takes two of Thermoworks standardized Pro-Series probes) and a wireless receiver unit - which lets the user track the air temperature and the food temperature without going outside to the smoker.
Thermoworks is selling the Smoke at $99 and this would definitely welcome tool for anyone who likes to slow cook food outside.

These days when I reach for a spatula to turn food in a pan, I've been finding myself grabbing the GastroMax Slotted Turner more often than not. Tina bought this spatula for me after months (or maybe years) of listening to me complain about our various spatulas. After buying the GastroMax Turner, my complaining has stopped.

A Quick Analysis of Knife and Sharpening Steel Hardness Surface hardness of through hardened steel products is a quick test used for quality assurance to determine if the proper heat treatment properties have been attained. Surface hardness can also be used as a component of a reverse engineering process to determine relative quality compared to a known product and to determine steel grade and heat treatment. In this case we have tested eight knives by five manufacturers in carbon steel and stainless steel and four sharpening steels to compare the relative hardness and provide insight into the performance of the knives.

Some chiles are so hot that they literally kill taste buds. Other chiles? Not so much. But how do you know how hot a chile is (before tasting it and potentially ending up in pain)? Believe it or not, there is a scientific system for measuring and rating the "hotness" of chiles.