Flavor alchemy

I’ve been having fun at a new food and cooking question and answer web site modeled on the the very successful stackoverflow site. The site claims to be in beta, but it is already very polished with a few hundred questions available for browsing. It is ad free and will probably remain so.

To help control spam and trolls, the site has a reputation system, where users that have contributed most to the site get higher reputation scores. Questions with very subjective answers are banned, so there is no point asking what is the best recipe for chocolate chip cookies.

You may post questions without registering, but you need to register to answer.

The answers cannot be too long, it’s just not the site’s style, so often users point to some food blog for a more detailed explanation. As an example, these are some of questions I have answered:

• How do you decide what temperature to bake at?
• Are there any reasonable substitutions for lemon juice?
• What’s the white liquidy substance that can appear when cooking salmon?
• What are alternative gelling agents to gelatin? And what are their properties?
• How to melt glucose?
• How to soft boil an egg
• Is there any difference between chopped and crushed garlic in cooking?
• Melting chocolate without it getting wet
• When baking, is it better to use a gas or electric oven?