About this bench

Cinder & Flask is a small reference site for kitchen chemistry: the science you can run on a domestic bench with supermarket ingredients, written as a procedure rather than as a demonstration. There are 16 cards on the bench today, and the rest arrive on a drip schedule rather than all at once.

What makes a card a card

Every card has the same six parts, because those are the six things we kept writing on scraps of paper next to the hob:

• Materials with substitutes. If a card calls for calcium lactate and you have none, the card says what happens if you use calcium chloride instead, including the fact that it tastes bitter.
• Numbered steps with an observation for each. The observation line is the part most instructions leave out. It tells you what a correct run looks like at that moment, so you know whether to carry on or start again.
• The principle. Written for an adult who has not studied chemistry since school, with the numbers left in.
• An everyday analogy. Not decoration. The analogy is usually the fastest way to predict what happens when you change something.
• Variations. Two or three changes that turn the same procedure into a different measurement.
• Clean-up and disposal. A bench that leaves a blocked drain behind it was not a good experiment.

How a card is tested

Nothing goes up until it has been run twice on a normal kitchen bench: once following the written steps exactly, and once by someone who had not read them. Timings, temperatures and mass figures in the observation lines are measured values from those runs, not estimates. Where a number swings a lot between runs, such as foam heights and crystal sizes, the card gives the range instead of a single figure.

Who signs the cards

Every card is written and checked by The Lab Bench, the editorial desk behind Cinder & Flask. It is a desk name, not a person: the cards carry no individual byline, no author photograph and no personal credentials, because the work is a bench routine rather than a column. A procedure is drafted, run twice on a domestic bench, and only then does the desk sign it; a card that does not survive its second run does not go up.

Safety

Every card carries a safety grade, and the grades are described in full on the safety page. The short version: nothing here uses mains electricity, nothing here should be eaten unless the card says so, and any procedure above 100 °C needs an adult in the room.

Independence and funding

The site is supported by display advertising, which is the only revenue it takes. Advertisers have no involvement in which experiments are written or what the cards say, and no card has ever been written to promote a product. Where a branded ingredient would change the result, the card says so and gives the generic alternative alongside it.

Corrections

If a step does not work as written, or a number looks wrong, write to [email protected] with the card name and what happened. Corrections are folded back into the card, and the bench date is left unchanged so that existing links keep working.