I’m a food geek. I spend my free time contemplating recipes. I bore my friends by talking about the Maillard reaction and annoy them by saying things like, “did you know that cheesecakes aren’t actually cakes at all?” I wonder about the techniques for replacing chemical with organic leavening and vice versa. I watch the Food Network, and Alton Brown is my hero.

I cook a lot, of course, and I’ve gotten pretty good at it. However, there are still a couple of things that give me problems. One area in particular is especially vexing to me: