{^ What’s in this book?^ }

About twenty years ago, celebrated food scientist,

author, and personal hero Harold McGee made a simple
statement: contrary to popular belief, searing meat before
roasting it does not “lock in the juices.†” Now, saying this
to a cook was like telling a physicist that rocks fall upward
or an Italian that pizza was invented in Iceland. Ever since
the mid-nineteenth century, when German food scientist
Justus von Liebig had first put forth the theory that searing
meat at very high temperatures essentially cauterizes its
surface and creates a moistureproof barrier, it had been
accepted as culinary fact. And for the next century and a
half, this great discovery was embraced by world-famous
chefs (including Auguste Escoffier, the father of French
cuisine) and passed on from mentor to apprentice and from
cookbook writer to home cook.
You’d think that with all that working against him,
McGee must have used the world’s most powerful
computer, or at the very least a scanning electron
microscope, to prove his assertion, right? Nope. His proof
was as simple as looking at a piece of meat. He noticed that
when you sear a steak on one side, then flip it over and
cook it on the second side, juices from the interior of the
steak are squeezed out of the top—the very side that was
supposedly now impermeable to moisture loss!