Cooking with a Touch of Science watchfully enables the cook to extend his or her culinary limits by explaining why certain steps and procedures are critical to producing a delicious meal, nurturing all around better cooking skills while introducing a selection of recipes sure to impress. Above all, this is a cookbook of favorite gourmet recipes, enhanced with insightful scientific explanations and valuable cooking tips. It contains 84 recipes, covering a wide range of foods from tender pancakes to roasts and stews, heavenly lasagna, savory cheese-and-cream-flavored fish-in-a-ramekin, exotica such as Lobster Thermidor, Beef Wellington, unusual foreign specialties, and tasty sauces that will turn any entree into a memorable feast. Recipes have been prepared and tested thoroughly by the author, George Brewer (PhD) over three decades. They are enlivened with stories of their origins and imaginative serving suggestions and are presented in an easy-to-read fashion. Special sections discuss in detail the best way to roast a turkey or cook a beef roast, with a well-tested primer on optimizing cooking time -- that most critical part of the cooking cycle -- to assure the best tasting, most tender and juicy meat. The detailed data from extensive cooking tests, providing specific cooking times for roasts and turkeys according to their shape and weight, form unique contributions to the art of preparing delicious food. For example, the conventional use of a numerical parameter- 'minutes/pound'- to estimate cooking times is shown to be not applicable to prime-rib class cuts of beef (including rib-eye and tenderloin roasts); this book offers a substitute procedure. In addition to four chapters that provide recipes for specific foods, a full chapter is devoted specifically to sauces, including explanations of the complexity and techniques of preparing sauces -- described by Julia Child as "The splendor and glory of ...cooking " The text is supplemented throughout by footnotes that provide details to assure ease of successful preparation. Cooking tips presented in Dr. Brewer's book alone are worth the space on your bookshelf. The tutorial discussions on food preparation will be helpful when preparing recipes from other sources. In other words, this book is different from many gourmet cookbooks and books about the science of cooking in that it applies just a bit of science to enhance the cook's understanding of cooking processes and procedures so that tastier foods might find their way onto the dining table. Enjoy "