Low-and-slow smoking transforms tough cuts into tender, flavorful cuisine

The benefits of sous vide: cooking food in bags immersed in water

Through this technique, food can be prepared to precise temperatures lower than those of open flames, without the risk of overcooking, with less oil, fat, and salt, and without requiring ongoing attention. By allowing for long cooking times, tougher cuts of meat can also be prepared at lower temperatures.

Understanding the biochemistry of ingredients and taste can improve flavor and texture

Keeping eggs at room temperature produces smoother batters when baking, and doing the same with tomatoes helps prevent a mealy, granular mouthfeel. Salting meat a day before gives more time for proteins to break down, improving flavor and tenderness, while cooking vegetables in well-salted water can lock in nutrients and color.

The food took root with Black Americans in the Civil War era

Because the technique requires little equipment and can tenderize tough or undesirable cuts of meat like ribs, barbecue took root among impoverished Black Americans in the late 1800s. When these communities moved north during the Great Migration, barbecue followed.

Barbecue can be made with direct or indirect heat

Direct heat, called “grilling” in the USA, involves quickly cooking ingredients directly over the heat source. It's usually used for hamburgers or Japanese yakitori skewers. Indirect heat, where the ingredients are placed adjacent to the flames to cook “low and slow,” is associated with American barbecue dishes like smoked brisket.

Memphis-style barbecue emphasizes pork

The cuisine's signature dish is dry-rubbed ribs. Before smoking, the meat gets a spice rub with paprika and chili powder. Some restaurants also offer their ribs “wet” (with sauce) or “muddy” (a mixture of sauce and rub).

Watch a pro butcher turn half a pig into eight common meals

The variety of food derived from a pig is enormous—from the common hot dog to delicate capicola. Watch butcher John Ratliff transform this meat into the basis of some of the most well-known meals.

How to cook food with lasers

Creative Machines Lab at Columbia Engineering have developed a system of software-controlled lasers to cook food with precision, retain moisture with the final-cooked product, brown food within its original packaging, and create an entirely new meal creation process for a consumer. Watch this three-minute video to see for yourself.

When it's good for your food to stick in the pan

Non-stick cookware has wired us to think any sticking in the pan is bad. While that's true for cleaning purposes, some foods—like thin smash burgers or sauces—require that stickiness to achieve the right taste or shape.

Watch someone follow an early American recipe using 19th-century technology

Following an old cookbook, one woman makes meatballs, pastries, potatoes, and spinach over her fireplace. The springtime dinner is taken from a 1778 book titled The Art of Cookery, which remained a bestseller throughout the 1820s.

How Michelin-starred chefs cook steak

Earning a Michelin star is no easy feat; neither is cooking a steak. This tutorial, featuring three Michelin-starred chefs, shows how the pros tackle the subtle art, walking even the most kitchen-averse eaters through the best ways to cook a great cut.

The basics of synthetic meat

Lab-grown meat companies promise to remove animal slaughter from the production process. But they have run into a few road bumps along the way.

To reduce wrinkles in clothing, research recommends gentle wash cycles with more water and tumble drying with smaller loads and longer times.

Beard was influenced by his godfather, a Chinese-born cook

Beard made no secret of the impact that Jue-Let, his godfather, had on his own love of food and cooking. Beard wrote about Let, though he has still been relegated to the annals of American cooking, something historians say is unfortunately common for minorities.

To reduce wrinkles in clothing, research recommends gentle wash cycles with more water and tumble drying with smaller loads and longer times.

'Slow productivity' as a humane approach to work

Work is increasingly encroaching on every part of our lives, while digital technologies enable supervisors to micromanage every part of an employee’s day. “Slow productivity” is a movement to alter the pace and quality of one’s work to avoid burnout and provide a more humane approach to work.

Cocktails now increasingly feature strange ingredients like bacon fat

Cocktail mixology has evolved in recent decades, shifting from a revival and reimagining of old favorites to pure experimentation. Where drinks were at one time anchored by a long-established favorite, now drink menus can feel incomprehensible to the average drinker, and little to indicate what the ultimate flavor profile of the libation will be.

Collagen supplements typically come from animal sources like fish, pigs, or cattle

Eating collagen-rich foods won't lead to more collagen in the body because your digestive system breaks down consumed collagen into amino acids. Instead, eating a healthy diet of proteins and greens helps your body to produce collagen. Collagen supplements derived from animal skin and bones are typically sold in a prebroken-down peptide formulation called hydrolyzed collagen so they can be absorbed through the gut into the bloodstream.

A guide to making ice cream with liquid nitrogen by flash-freezing dairy

Only existing in liquid form at extremely low temperatures, nitrogen can rapidly freeze cream, coconut milk, and other liquids into small crystals, producing smooth, creamy ice cream. As a safety precaution, liquid nitrogen should be handled in a well-ventilated area with safety goggles and protective gloves.

Slow pour-over coffee resists the haste of 'espresso' and commodification of drip

Pour-over coffee involves what its name suggests: slowly pouring hot water from a gooseneck kettle over a funnel of ground coffee, usually requiring at least 3 minutes. This trend developed in the 1970s in opposition to on-demand drip coffee and "espresso," literally invented as an "express" option to save time.

The role of fire in the evolution of humanity's big brains

Roughly 1.5 million years ago, the brain size of our hominin ancestors exploded. To understand why, Richard Wrangham posited the cooking hypothesis, arguing the adoption of fire as a means to cook food had a lasting impact on our ability to digest...

Some materials can absorb low-energy light and emit high-energy radiation

Through anti-Stokes cooling, incoming energy is combined with vibrations in a material's crystal lattice to produce a net reduction in its temperature. Using this effect, lasers can be directed at microchip hot spots to help keep data centers cool.

Learn how your body is, scientifically, like a firework with its own slow, controlled burn.

What should you eat to help the climate?

Climate change is impacted by what we eat and what we don't eat. Did you know, for instance, that livestock accounts for 14.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases each year? Eating less meat and dairy and more protein-rich plants like beans,...

Inflammaging appears to differ across global populations

Chronic, low-grade inflammation linked to aging is a byproduct of our industrialized lifestyles, according to recent research. The work compared two industrialized populations with two Indigenous, non-industrialized populations in Bolivia and Malaysia, and found that inflammation levels in the Indigenous groups—unlike the industrialized ones—did not seem to differ by age.

Learn about the chemical refinement of crude oil, from cracking to reforming and blending

Just as an organism's digestive system can break down complex molecules in food into simple sugars that cells can use, cracking uses catalysts and other chemicals to break apart large hydrocarbons in crude oil into smaller molecules. These can then be chemically reshaped, combined, or purified into useful petroleum products.

Microtears in muscles from exercise cause fibers to grow back larger

Placing muscle under increased load or stress causes damage that requires rest to repair, leading to stronger, more enduring muscle over time. Muscles adapt to such increasing demands by improving their efficiency with approaches that include increasing the number of mitochondria housed in hundreds of thousands of muscle cells.

Viscosity is a fluid's resistance to flow, which varies with temperature

Liquids become less viscous as temperature increases, while gases become more viscous and therefore flow more slowly. The increased gas collisions at higher temperatures contribute to greater friction between streamlines, increasing viscosity.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of young men ate standard American food—replete with food additives like borax and formaldehyde—as part of government research to better understand food safety.

The history of many kitchen appliances involves unexpected discoveries and applications, including wartime radar turned hamster defroster and replacing an 'ice king' with heat-stealing boxes.

Fast-casual restaurant Chili's is experiencing a resurgence, with its parent company recently reporting a nearly 32% increase in sales, thanks to passionate Gen Z fans on TikTok.

Hear 50 years of iconic hip-hop samples, the genre's foundational looped tracks

The boiling temperature of water decreases with increasing elevation because the molecules need less energy to overcome the lower atmospheric pressure associated with thinner air.

The use of fungi to detoxify land and water—a process known as mycoremediation—has been used to clean up natural resources affected by the 2025 California wildfires.

'Shogun,' a 1980s TV series, helped popularize sushi in the US by stimulating an American interest in Japanese culture.

Tattoos remain visible on your skin thanks to immune cells called macrophages

Indefinite cloning of some endangered species may not sustain their longevity because cloning success rates decrease as genetic mutations accumulate.

Poison ivy is in the same family as mangoes, cashews, and pistachios—and they all produce oily urushiol in their raw, unprocessed state—but they are typically prepared in ways to avoid causing human discomfort.

Gerrymandering works through two techniques: cracking opposing voters across districts to dilute their power, and packing them into a few to waste their votes in lopsided majorities.

For centuries, it was common to sleep in two shifts: a few hours at the beginning of the night, and a longer period beginning around midnight

Cultural norms about how to handle the bodies of loved ones in communities in West Africa have hampered Ebola responses.

Domino's Pizza's 30-minute delivery guarantee was responsible for the chain's 1980s surge, but it was discontinued after the company was found liable for delivery driver accidents.

The word 'jazz' evolved from 'jasm,' 19th-century American slang for 'energy'

American short story writer Flannery O'Connor raised 40 peacocks, which became potent symbols for her fiction's elegant violence

Objects can be 3D printed with light by projecting 2D computerized tomography (CT) scans onto rotating cylinders of resin, which solidify upon exposure.

Frank Lloyd Wright's houses are historically hard to sell because they're old, subject to local landmark commissions, and often unfashionable

Explore the animals that populate the depths of the ocean, from fish and coral in the first few hundred feet, all the way down to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

Louisiana's 'Cancer Alley' is infamous for having some of the highest industrial pollution, toxic air emissions, and cancer risks in the US.

Many legends about George Washington, including his supposed wooden teeth and the story of cutting down the cherry tree, lack evidence.

Learn how to read a prospectus, the juicy document that any company must file with the SEC before going public.

SpongeBob exemplifies Aristotle's philosophy for living well because he understands that happiness doesn't come from external factors like money, recognition, or power.