Science in the Kitchen:
Guy Crosby ’64
Sound more like a science lesson than dinner prep? For Crosby, they’re one and the same. Since graduating from UNH in 1964 with a degree in chemistry, his career has focused on the science of food — specifically how chemistry plays an important role not only in how our bodies deal with the food we eat but also in the preparation of the food itself.
He’s worked for many years in food-related research and development, and is co-author of the popular Cook’s Illustrated books “The Science of Good Cooking” and “Cook’s Science.” In 2019, Columbia University Press published his book, “Cook, Taste, Learn: How the Evolution of Science Transformed the Art of Cooking,” which toured the history and science behind cooking, from the ability to control fire to modern science’s understanding of what happens at a molecular level when we apply heat to food.
Between UNH and those successes, he attended Brown University to earn a Ph.D. in organic chemistry. It was during those graduate years when a new snack idea was born.
“I remember thinking … the whole idea that we could use chemistry and food when I was in graduate school because I came up with the idea of flavored potato chips,” he says. Back then there was no sour cream and onion options, no Cool Ranch, no Hickory BBQ or any of the dozens of today’s flavors.
He experimented making flavored potato chips, purchasing onion and garlic compounds from a chemical supply company and adding them to the cooking oil as he deep fried his hand-cut potatoes in the kitchen of his sister and brother-in-law who lived nearby.
His brother-in-law, an executive with pharmaceutical company Merck, joined Crosby on this venture.
“We came up with stuff that was pretty good. We were getting kind of serious about it,” Crosby says, even meeting with Cape Cod Potato Chip Company. The idea might have actually gone forward were it not for a promotion at Merck for the brother-in-law that took him out of Rhode Island.
But the snack-world’s loss was the food-science world’s gain, as evidenced by Crosby’s work as science editor at “America’s Test Kitchen,” a cooking show produced for public television known for its rigorous testing of recipes and kitchen supplies. He also was science editor at Milk Street Kitchen, a multimedia, instructional food preparation organization.
He describes himself as a chemist first, a foodie second, and has done extensive interviews and webinars on cooking; he was in particularly high demand around the holidays because he had specific advice on how to prep that turkey or what kind of potatoes to buy, depending on how you intended to cook them. Make notes for November: His one big take-away for turkey is to salt it beforehand, either with a brine or by hand-rubbing it.
But, as much cooking as Crosby does, and as much as he knows about the science of cooking, when it comes to Thanksgiving, it’s all left to his wife of 57 years, Christine.
“The way I recommended cooking a turkey is not the way she will cook it,” he has said. “And I certainly am not about to tell her how to cook her turkey.”