To begin
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.
Newest pieces
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Flavor
How miracle fruit turns sour into sweet
A small red berry from West Africa makes a lemon taste like candy for an hour or so. The trick lives in one protein and one receptor, and regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have kept it on a short leash.
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Food and place
Rooftop and indoor growing for restaurants
A shelf of microgreens by the pass is cheap and quick to pay back. A farm meant to supply the whole menu is another business, and several well-funded ones have gone under.
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Food and place
What food miles measure and what they miss
The distance a tomato traveled is easy to picture and hard to use. Two decades of research say it matters a lot for some foods and very little for others.
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Kitchen lab
Sous-vide at home: the time and temperature behind a safe low-heat cook
A water bath set to 140°F (60°C) can make chicken as safe as a pan taken to 165°F (74°C). It only works if the clock starts at the right moment and the bag is handled properly afterwards.
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Kitchen lab
Spherification at home: alginate, calcium and the gel skin
Two powders from the modernist pantry turn a spoonful of juice into a bead that bursts on the tongue. One comes from seaweed, the other is a salt, and the order in which they meet decides how the bead behaves.
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Flavor
What the tongue actually detects
The tongue reports only a handful of things, and it reports all of them from everywhere it has taste buds. Most of what people call taste arrives by another route.
The sections
On the fridge door
When the fridge dies: borrow the quote, not the limit
A home kitchen can lose its air fryer without anyone noticing, but a fridge that stops changes dinner the same night. The parts around the sealed loop give out first, a fault in the first two years is the seller’s to fix under Polish law, and only after that does the quote for a new one set the size of any loan, from Wandoo or elsewhere.