In 2005, Kari Ojala authored a cookbook for a specific group of people who tend not to read cookbooks: engineers. The Engineer’s Cookbook was an instant bestseller in its home territory Scandinavia. Since a few nerds and geeks are known to live outside Scandinavia, Ojala decided to translate his cookbook in English. Now, it is available as an ebook that can be read on Amazon Kindle, Apple iPad and iPhone and on all devices that can open EPUB books.

The Engineer’s Cookbook is not your ordinary cookbook with recipes and pretty photos. It doesn’t even have photos, but sketches with exact measurements.

The book has two dimensions: it comes with very specific instructions for preparing some common dishes, and it opens a window into a geek’s mindset.

An engineer will enjoy cooking relying on instructions he or she can readily understand, and all other people can take a look inside the fascinating mind of a nerd.

A brief sample from a chapter that describes the inner world of a geek:
”The engineer is above all a rational being, whether it is stake, poultry, fish or vegetables that he prefers.
At the same time, the engineer is forever a child at heart. For him, preparing food is a mental game where you seek out matching ingredients, optimise their quantities, schedule their preparation times, and serve precisely the needed amounts of the correct types of food at exactly the right time. When all this falls in place, the engineer enjoys himself.”

If you have wondered why an engineer approaches cooking differently, there’s a chapter that describes it as well:
”It may seem that the engineer’s thought world is in this way somewhat strait-laced or neurotic. This is nonetheless not true. Deep down, the engineer is really quite relaxed. He has inner peace. He has thought things through and knows what is right. For that reason, he also knows to anticipate the outcome of each solution. This can of course annoy less confident individuals and the engineer does well not to always reveal the extent of his wisdom.
Due to his inner peace, the engineer can also be a humble cook. He appreciates and knows how to use ingenious ingredients, whether they are nature’s own or developed by other engineers. Onion or minced meat, for instance, are in their unassuming simplicity and versatility outstanding inventions, before which the engineer is humbled. If only he were capable of such simplicity, focusing only on the essential!”

Download free sample chapters, or get the book from Amazon Kindle Store, Apple iBookstore, or Kobo store.