Culinary Reactions - pdf

Culinary Reactions: The Everyday Chemistry of Cooking

When you’re cooking, you’re a chemist! Every time you follow or modify a recipe, you are experimenting with acids and bases, emulsions and suspensions, gels and foams. In your kitchen you denature proteins, crystallize compounds, react enzymes with substrates, and nurture desired microbial life while suppressing harmful bacteria and fungi. And unlike in a laboratory, you can eat your experiments to verify your hypotheses.
In Culinary Reactions, author Simon Quellen Field turns measuring cups, stovetop burners, and mixing bowls into graduated cylinders, Bunsen burners, and beakers. How does altering the ratio of flour, sugar, yeast, salt, butter, and water affect how high bread rises? Why is whipped cream made with nitrous oxide rather than the more common carbon dioxide? And why does Hollandaise sauce call for “clarified” butter? This easy-to-follow primer even includes recipes to demonstrate the concepts being discussed, including:
· Whipped Creamsicle Topping—a foam
· Cherry Dream Cheese—a protein gel
· Lemonade with Chameleon Eggs—an acid indicator

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Full of charts, step-by-step photos, structural formulas, and amazing recipes (the cherry cream cheese has me drooling), you will become a better cook without even trying.” —MAKE Magazine

“This clear primer to the chemistry of cooking goes well beyond the basics to teach cooks how to improve their results scientifically.” —Science News


“The writing style is very personable and he does a great job of illustrating concepts with recipes.”


“With information advanced enough to interest the well-seasoned, hard-boiled home cook, the information in this book is written in such a friendly and approachable manner that even beginner kitchen-chemists will be delighted to learn from it.”—San Francisco Book Review

“A gateway into the science of food.” —Gastronomica

Product Details

Language: English
ISBN-10: 1569767068
ISBN-13: 978-1569767061

Reviews

My degrees are in chemistry and I consider myself reasonable well read when it comes to gastronomy, so I enjoyed the book and read it completely. But I think if I were someone expecting to be lead through an understanding of basic food chemistry and simultaneously basic cooking/baking I would have been confused and disappointed. You'd come away with some facts, but I don't think you'd come away with an understanding of the chemistry of cooking or baking, and I don't think you'd become a better cook (or chemist).

This book is not poorly written and does contain knowledge worth learning. The problem I had with the book is I had already purchased and read "the science and Lore of the kitchen" written by Harold McGee. I had found that Harold McGee's book was more detailed and covered a vast amount of knowledge. When I compared both books I felt like Culinary Reactions was kind of like attending a second grade class but you already graduate from high school, I found myself asking, why am I reading this? I can recommend this book to someone who is interested in obtaining the basics of food science. But if you are looking for more than I recommend "the science and Lore of the kitchen" written by Harold McGee.

The language is clear and scientific. He explains the way molecules interact to create foams such as bread and meringues, how beer and vinegar are made, how specific cultured bacteria can create inhospitable environments for more dangerous bacteria. The affects of acids and bases on recipes, including a very clear explanation of the difference between the two.