Tongue and Tine

Tongue and Tine is written for people who cook at home and keep wondering why food behaves the way it does. Why does a wedge of lemon taste like candy for half an hour after someone chews a small red berry? What is the tongue picking up when it registers salt, or the savory depth of a stock that has simmered all afternoon? How can a sealed bag in a pot of warm water cook a steak edge to edge without turning the outside gray, and what happens to bacteria at those lower temperatures? And how much does the distance a tomato traveled say about what it cost the planet?

New readers can start with one of three pieces: how miracle fruit works for taste, sous-vide time and temperature for technique, or what food miles measure for where food comes from.

Those questions fall into three sections.

Flavor treats taste as biology. It looks at the receptor cells on the tongue and what each kind responds to, and at miracle fruit, the West African berry whose protein, miraculin, makes sour food taste sweet for a while. It also covers how regulators in the United States have handled that protein.

Kitchen lab takes methods that began in professional modernist kitchens and asks what survives on a home counter. Sous-vide cooking gets the full treatment, with the temperatures and holding times that make it safe. Spherification, where a flavored liquid sets into beads inside a thin gel skin, gets an explanation of the alginate and calcium chemistry behind it. The section also weighs which equipment a home kitchen actually uses and which mostly takes up drawer space.

Food and place is about growing food close to where it is eaten: beds on rooftops, shelves of greens under lights indoors, and the ambition of a kitchen that serves nothing grown more than a few steps away. It also asks what the familiar food miles figure measures and what it leaves out.

Claims about food science and regulation are checked against primary sources, such as federal agencies, university food-science departments and published research. Where a piece involves food safety, the temperatures and times come from published federal guidance.

Each article carries the day it was completed, and the archive puts them all in sequence. The about page explains what kind of site this is.