Some people just can't leave well enough alone.

...

Consider, for instance, the case of the famous food writer.

The one who used the scientific method to take apart everything we know about cooking

and put it back together.

If you use vodka in place of some of the water in your pie crust,

you end up with a dough that is much flakier and much lighter.

He investigated whether the key ingredient in New York pizza

really is the water.

So I did a full double-blind experiment where I got water

starting with perfectly distilled water

and then up to various levels of dissolved solids inside the water.

What we basically end up finding was that the water

makes almost no difference compared to other variables in the dough.

He found that the secret to general toes chicken lay in geometry.

The geometry of food is important because one of the big things is

surface area of volume ratio.

And he explored the relationship between meat and salt.

He proved why it's important to salt a hamburger at the last minute

on the surface of the meat.

We rented a baseball pitching machine that would throw hamburgers at the wall

at 45 miles per hour.

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