Focusing on food as a platform for everyday science, this paper details our fieldwork with practitioners who routinely experiment with preserving, fermenting, brewing, pickling, foraging for, and healing with food. We engage with these at-home science initiatives as community-driven efforts to construct knowledge and envision alternatives to top-down modes of production. Our findings detail the motivations, challenges, and workarounds behind these practices, as well as participants' hybrid lay-professional knowledge, and the iterative mechanisms by which their expertise is scaffolded. Our paper contributes to CHI's amateur/citizen science research by examining how social, digital, and physical materials shape scientific literacy; and to sustainable HCI by presenting habitual practice as an alternative (bottom-up) form of food production and preservation.