Why is the kitchen a laboratory?

We run experiments in the kitchen every day, even if we rarely call them that. Lighting the hob switches on a heat source, locking the lid of a pressure cooker sets up a pressure vessel, and stirring a spoonful of yoghurt into warm milk starts a bacterial culture. Recipes are experimental protocols whose results you can eat.

This journey first makes the difference between heat and temperature clear. Then it shows why water doesn't boil at 100 °C everywhere and how the pressure cooker turns that rule to its advantage: you'll set the altitude yourself to see where water boils in a high city such as Erzurum, and find the pressure a pressure cooker needs. Next it's on to the frying pan: the crust on a köfte (a Turkish meatball) and sugar melting in a pan turn the same brown, but they come from completely different reactions.

The last two steps show the kitchen's living, calculating side. You'll see how the two kinds of bacteria in a spoonful of yoghurt turn a whole pan of milk into yoghurt, and then, as you scale a recipe up from 4 servings to 10, what is directly proportional and what is not. By the end you'll start to see the kitchen as a laboratory: a place with variables, where you measure and test the result.