ABSTRACT
Scott Sandford’s ‘‘kitchen,’’ as he calls it, is a curious place to prepare a meal.
Mind you, the empty bottles of champagne on a shelf (momentos of particularly successful culinary creations) might seem at home in an ordinary kitchen. But while the bearded and bearish middle-aged ‘‘chef’’ may slave over a hot stove at home, here at the NASA Ames Research Center near San Jose´, California, he labors over a high-tech piece of equipment that should, by all rights, carry the Sub Zero brand name. That’s because his device chills his raw ingredients to just a tad above absolute zero. Only then does it cook them, and not with a flame but with ultraviolet radiation.
