Pour some milk in a dish (whole milk works best, but honestly, use whatever’s not expired), drop in some food coloring, then touch it with a dish soap-dipped cotton swab. The colors will scatter like ...

Several times while reading “The Food Lab,” the new cookbook from J. Kenji López-Alt, I wished I had the text in a keyword-searchable format—I wanted to put on my Internet goggles and surf.

The year was 2006. I had started posting my kitchen experiments on my blog, Saffron Trail. I am consciously choosing the term experiments because I was still finding my feet in the kitchen, putting ...

Let me be transparent–I’m not going to pretend these kitchen experiments won’t create a mess. They will. There will be vinegar on your floor, food coloring on hands that lasts a day or two, and ...