About
Two shows, one kitchen, one cook. Who makes this, why it works the way it does, and why the failures stay in.
Amberstone Cooks is made by David Burstein.
At about ten I was nagging my mother for a cake. She handed me her copy of Mrs Beeton's Cookery and Household Management, the 1960 edition, and said: "If you can read, you can cook." I made a chocolate cake. It was probably grim. But it was version 0.1, and a lifelong passion for cooking, and with cookbooks, started right there. I still have the book.
I then trained as an electronic engineer and spent the first part of my working life designing things that had to behave the same way every time: systems for things that sank on purpose, in a controlled fashion, and for things in the air that needed to stay there, and later the software and businesses built on top of all that. Engineering leaves habits. You write down what you did. You change one thing at a time. You do not trust a result you cannot repeat, and you keep the failures, because that is where the information is.
Cooking got the same treatment in the end. Not because it needed fixing, but because I wanted to know why a recipe worked when it did, and what had actually gone wrong when it did not. A recipe is a specification written by someone who was never in your kitchen. An ingredient is a material with properties. The distance between the two is the working, and the working is what this site is for.
Cook My Books takes the cookbooks worth owning at their word. Each episode cooks a recipe exactly as written, then says plainly what worked, what did not, and what I would adjust. The book gets its full say before I get mine.
The Ingredient Project takes a single ingredient apart. Methods are run against held conditions, same variety, same weights, same salt, and judged blind, so that what changes an ingredient can be told from what merely masks it. Projects are numbered, and the numbering is not decoration.
You will see hands, a bench and a great many ingredients. You will rarely see a face. Nothing is being hidden; there is simply more to look at on the board than behind it.
Membership is free. Members get the written work behind each episode: full quantities, bench notes, the versions that failed, and the verdicts. Comments are open to members.
Amberstone Cooks is owned and published by David Burstein. Enquiries: hello@amberstonecooks.com.