Lynness: Reading reference cookbooks

So, I got CookWise by Shirley Corriher, who is one someone restaurants and chefs go to when they are having problems with their recipes.  It's a cooking reference book with almost 500 8.5x11 pages all about the properties of ingredients and how they interact chemically, and how time, temperatures, etc, affect them.  It does have recipes, which are given to illustrate the principles in the chapter- I remember one set of recipes in particular, which are the same except for the order and technique used to mix them.

I don't know that it's really meant to be read straight through, but I did, and now I need to go back and take notes.  I learned some interesting things, like why my zucchini bread has a rich green color around the sunflower seeds that has nothing to do with the zucchini (the flavenols in the sunflower seeds react with the alkali baking soda- a similar reaction makes the blue ring around cherries in baking).  There's also troubleshooting helps- my first counselor was early for a presidency meeting and was browsing through it and learned that the reason her meringues bead up on top is that they get too hot.  The solution, counter-intuitively, is too cook it at a higher temp to get it done faster, because lower but longer cooking actually gets the inside of the meringue hotter.

I've got 3 more food science books coming.  I am a pretty decent cook, but I love learning why things work or don't, and I have some recipes that need a bit more....something.  Maybe now I'll know what.