Home Chemistry

Picture a Saturday morning in late August. You come home from the farmers market with a wooden crate of tomatoes that costs less than a good sandwich, and by the time you set them down on the counter, the whole kitchen smells like a summer garden. There are more tomatoes here than you and your family could eat in a week if you tried, and half of them will be starting to soften by Tuesday. You could freeze some. You could give some away. Or, if you knew how, you could turn all of them into twelve shelf-stable quarts of crushed tomatoes that will sit on a pantry shelf until next August, taste...

This book replaces kitchen guesswork with foundational food science, giving you the practical rules and mechanisms to confidently diagnose failures, adapt any recipe, and cook memorable meals with repeatable success. You already know a good cook when you taste one, but you may have quietly assumed their skill is a mysterious gift you were born without. That story is not true. Every technique that separates a memorable meal from a mediocre one runs on a small number of specific, learnable rules, and this manuscript walks you through all of them in plain English, without a chemistry degree, ...

You bit into the chili and your mouth caught fire. You crushed the garlic and the whole kitchen changed smell in one second. You bought a jar of paprika that looks vibrant on the outside and tastes like nothing at all. Every one of those experiences is the same handful of molecules doing exactly what plants evolved them to do, long before you ever picked up a wooden spoon. The Science of Spice is the plain-English guide to what is actually happening. Inside this book you will find: The plain-English science guide that explains why spices smell, burn, and heal. Turn your spice rack into a ...

Brought to you by Penguin. From the New York Times bestselling author of Dear Edward comes a beautifully tender, heartbreaking, and moving story of four sisters over three decades Meet the Padvano girls. Best friends and sisters, they are thought of as inseparable by everyone in their close-knit...

A flaming love story. Action. Adventure. An FBI thriller. Adam is a wildly beautiful man. Beyond sexy. A real 21st century warrior. Raven is a gorgeous woman. Sensual. A dancer. A nurse. And she's starting over because her betrayer is behind prison walls. Forever. ◆◆◆ Raven Macawi is fabulous. Long red hair. Filled with fire. And a dancer with a body to kill for. But she's private. Secretive. Hesitant. Which is understandable since she's only been in Lake Charles for four months. And why Louisiana? Because she is starting over with her son in the land of her ancestors. The Atakapa. ...

Your GPS runs a relativistic time correction of 38 microseconds a day. Without it, navigation puts you twelve kilometres from where you want to be. The soap in your bathroom has been solving the same molecular problem since 2800 BCE. The window you look through every morning took four thousand years to make flat. The non-stick pan on your stove came out of the nuclear weapons programme. The microwave oven exists because Percy Spencer was standing in front of a radar set when his chocolate bar melted. Every object in your home was made by someone who spent years on a problem you have never ...

The spectacular culinary creations of modern cuisine are the stuff of countless articles and social media feeds. But to a scientist they are also perfect pedagogical explorations into the basic scientific principles of cooking. In Science and Cooking, Harvard professors Michael Brenner, Pia Sörensen, and David Weitz bring the classroom to your kitchen to teach the physics and chemistry underlying every recipe. 

The James Beard Award–winning, bestselling author of CookWise and BakeWise delivers kitchen wisdom based on her knowledge of food science so that “cooks of any experience level will walk away from this sharp guide with some new tricks” (Publishers Weekly). Want to cook fluffier scrambled...

This plain-language guide moves beyond simple recipe collections to teach home cooks the underlying chemistry and microbiology of fermentation, equipping them with the scientific understanding needed to confidently make, adjust, and troubleshoot any ferment. Most fermentation books hand you a recipe and a promise about probiotics. This one hands you the underlying chemistry, so every recipe you meet from this point forward finally makes sense. Written for **first-time fermenters, curious foodies, and home cooks who want to understand what their kitchen is actually doing**, this is a plain-...

You pulled the cake from the oven and it sank in the middle. The bread came out pale and gummy on the bottom. The cookies that were supposed to be chewy turned into crackers. You followed the recipe, you measured carefully, and it still went wrong inside that sealed box of heat. The frustrating part is that you never found out why. This book gives you the why. Baking is the most chemistry-like thing that happens in a home kitchen, and that is not a metaphor. The moment you mix flour, water, fat, and heat, you set off a chain of molecular events that are locked in before the pan ever reaches...

“Time travel romance at its best!”—Fresh Fiction on Chance of a Lifetime They can’t be together, but they can’t stay apart… Liam O’Connor has one purpose in this life—to push the woman he loves into the arms of another man. The Irish rogue unknowingly changed the course of...

Every jar in your pantry holds a promise — and a question. Was it made correctly? Does it actually protect the food inside? If you have ever stood in front of a row of home-canned jars and wondered whether tradition and a family recipe are truly enough to keep everyone safe, this book was written for you. Home food preservation is one of the oldest and most rewarding kitchen crafts — but it is also one where the difference between a perfectly safe jar and a deadly one is invisible, odorless, and tasteless. Botulism produces no odor, no color change, no warning. That gap between what ...

You followed the recipe exactly, and dinner still went wrong. The steak came out gray and tough, the sauce broke, the vegetables turned to mush, and you have no idea why. Cooking can feel like guesswork because most recipes tell you what to do but never why it works, so when something fails you cannot fix it. This book changes that. It hands you the simple, real science happening inside every pan, pot, and oven, explained in plain language with no equations, no jargon, and no chemistry degree required. Once you understand what heat, water, salt, fat, and protein are actually doing to your ...

Most bread books hand you a recipe. This one hands you the underlying science, so every recipe you meet from this point forward finally makes sense. Written for **first-time bakers, curious home cooks, and hobby bakers who want to understand what their dough is actually doing**, this is a plain-language guide to the flour, water, yeast, and heat that turn a simple mixture into a golden crust and a soft, open crumb. It is not a recipe collection. It is a working mental model of what happens inside the mixing bowl and the oven, so that any recipe you pick up next becomes readable, adjustable,...

You reach into your refrigerator and pull out yogurt, a jar of sauerkraut, a bottle of hot sauce, and last night's leftovers from a Japanese restaurant. Every one of those foods — the tangy yogurt, the sour kraut, the savory miso in that soup — is the product of invisible chemistry running on your kitchen counter, in a crock, or inside a vat somewhere. Microbes you cannot see have been turning sugar into acid, alcohol, and flavor for ten thousand years of human food history. This is the book that explains exactly how, and it requires no lab, no degree, and no background in science ...

Discover the hidden world behind every perfect cup of coffee. In The Fire Within the Bean: Exploring the Art, Science, and Soul of Coffee Roasting, The Practical Atlas takes readers deep inside the transformative process that turns raw green beans into aromatic perfection. Combining clear scientific explanation with cultural insight, this book reveals how heat, chemistry, and time create flavor, aroma, and texture. Learn how professional roasters balance time and temperature, how first and second crack shape taste, and how roast profiles bring out floral, fruity, or smoky notes. Explore the...

"Brenda Novak doesn't just write fabulous stories, she writes keepers."—Susan Mallery, #1 New York Times bestselling author Enjoy small town charm, Christmas cheer and a heartfelt second chances/opposites attract romance from New York Times bestselling author Brenda Novak! Single mom Patience...

Spices and herbs aren’t magic; they’re molecules. Every jar on your shelf holds plant defenses, volatile oils, pigments, and aromatics that your brain turns into flavor. This book shows home cooks, culinary students, and food obsessives exactly how that chemistry works, in plain language you can use at the stove tonight. It turns everyday seasoning into a deliberate, repeatable craft grounded in flavor science. +450 pages and over 100 diagrams/images Inside this book, readers will learn how to: Understand the five basic tastes and hundreds of aroma signals that create flavor Use chili ...

"A delight!" --Sophie Cousens, New York Times bestselling author "The perfect escape for every sweet romance lover!" --Courtney Walsh, New York Times bestselling author "Another laugh out loud, pitch perfect romance." --Annabel Monaghan, bestselling author Wes left Addie at the altar two decades...

Hometown Heartbreakers Collection has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher...