Welcome to Chemist Kitchen! My goal for this website is to create a safe space to explore and experiment with the intersection of cooking, art, culture, and chemistry. My hope is to push the limit of my ideas and basically shout into the void my process in developing and refining recipes. Think of this as a sort of crash test/ creative kitchen diary. Anything can and will go and I’ll try to dive into what makes recipes interesting to me and why they do or don’t work.
A little bit about my inspiration: Professionally, I am an industrial research and development chemist. I spend a lot of time on the job thinking about ways to make things, how to optimize processes, how to make more interesting “flavors” of our products. Since I started working, I’ve noticed that my professional habits have started bleeding into my kitchen. Documentation, experimentation, trial and error are all practices I want to embrace in this.
Personally, I am also inspired by culture in food. I am a raised New Mexican, born in Texas, with heritage in Europe. I love playing with New Mexican chiles and have learned a lot recently about our spin on traditional dishes like posole, enchiladas, and carnitas. New Mexican food is bold and rich in flavor. Meanwhile, I also love the flavors of Texas like barbeque with smoky, fatty, richly rendered beef brisket combined with briny, acidic pickles. Then finally more subtly flavored European comfort foods like British meat pies, Swiss fondue, and Italian pastas. I think there is are a lot of really interesting flavors that can come out of playing with these classic dishes as a sort of baseline.
On this site, you will find food essays accompanied with a portfolio of recipes as I experiment and land on things I like. You may find me doing some silly things like statistical design of experiments on a cookie recipe or New Mexican meat pies. Please stick around and enjoy if that’s the kind of thing you’re interested in. And please reach out to me if you have ideas you’d like me to try!
Chemist Kitchen 