Cooking science

Originally published in the Ketchikan Daily News, February 2009; written by Lisa Pearson.

There are some things in life that you wouldn’t ordinarily associate with each other, such as ‘birthday cake’ and ‘electrical engineering’, or perhaps ‘ice cream’ and ‘liquid nitrogen’. Yet when you think about it, what is cooking except fancy chemistry with end products you can actually ingest? If a little biochemistry can turn grape juice into wine, why not use dry ice to make a martini fit for James Bond? With a couple of our new books you can do all this and more.

“The Hungry Scientist Handbook: electric birthday cakes, edible origami, and other DIY projects for techies, tinkerers, and foodies” is a compilation of projects put together by Patrick Buckley and Lily Binns with a little help from their friends. Apparently, when you bring together an MIT graduate and the niece of a cookbook author, you end up with some truly fun things to do on an afternoon. The nice thing about this book is that it runs the gamut of scientific and culinary expertise.

If you barely got through 9th-grade science class but you’re a whiz in the kitchen, you might try making the homemade marshmallows and leaving the construction of the trebuchet (which will launch the marshmallows) to someone else. On the other hand, if making ramen noodles is the peak of your cooking ability, you can put together the LED candle array for a cake that someone else has made. You can experiment with the beer-can camp stove, the pomegranate wine, or a pinhole-camera pumpkin. Feeling romantic? There’s a recipe for edible lingerie made of caramel.

The most technical project in the book is the solar-powered, heat-sensitive coaster that changes colors depending on whether the drink it supports is hot or cold. In fact, we almost put this book in the electronics section of the library based on this ‘recipe’ alone. Regardless of your skill level, however, you have to love a cookbook that includes the sentence “The beautifully symmetric regular icosahedron is one of the five Platonic solids, or convex regular polyhedrons”. You won’t read that in a Rachel Ray cookbook.

Our other new book really does get into the nuts and bolts of how recipes work. “The Science of Good Food: the ultimate reference on how cooking works” is by David Joachim and Andrew Schloss. This is actually set up as an encyclopedia of cooking terms and techniques, which means that it is not a book you would ordinarily sit down and read cover-to-cover.

If you’ve ever wondered how baking powder works (and what exactly is “double-acting”?), or why you might want to add baking soda to your tempura batter you can look up the term ‘chemical leavener’. You could also find out the link between a fashionable green (endive) and the camp coffee of the Civil War (chicory).

Fortunately, this book has an extensive cross-reference system and a nice index. Even though the discussions of baking soda and baking powder are lumped under one highly technical term, it is easy to find information using layman’s terms.

I find that it’s better to master a cooking technique if I understand the science behind it, and it becomes simpler to do emergency substitutions if I know the role my missing ingredient plays in the overall recipe. (If you’re really interested in being able to juggle substitutions, I recommend Joachim’s other fabulous cook’s reference: “The Food Substitutions Bible”).

So the next time someone tells you that cooking is an arcane, boring skill, offer them a homemade LED lollipop or a glass of beer made from raisins. Sláinte!