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. The site is well designed and right now, ad free.

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 and are granted editing privileges. Questions with very subjective answers are discouraged and may be closed to answers. Asking for the best recipe for chocolate chip cookies may be discouraged, but how to get those cookies high and soft would be OK.

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?

The questions present all sorts of research issues and experiments. I have spent too many hours tracing the history of the use of volumes instead of mass measurements in American recipes. And I still have not figured out a good way to roast zucchini.

Edits

The original version of this post incorporates corrections suggested by hobodave, one of cooking.sx’s longtime users.