Recipe

Cooking for engineers - Aioli garlic mayo

Alex Mags

Aioli!

Here’s the technical specification for a Aioli also known as garlic mayo. Goes well with seafood or chicken. You make a garlic paste by drawing the back of a knife over chopped cloves. The raw garlic is punchy!.

Cooking for engineers - Soda bread recipe

Alex Mags

soda bread!

Here’s the technical specification for a tasty loaf of bread. A restaurant near me serves and sells this bread. It’s very quick to make and so tasty!

The Chemistry Stack Overview

Soda bread is fundamentally a chemical leavening system. Unlike yeast-based breads that rely on biological fermentation (slow deployment), soda bread uses an acid-base reaction for immediate lift. The kefir/buttermilk (pH ~4.5) reacts with sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO₃) to produce carbon dioxide gas, which expands in the dough matrix to create the crumb structure—think of it like deploying a containerized workload that instantly scales your dough volume.