• Question: What is the scientific way of describing the making food such as pizza ?

    Asked by xXx_Joseph_Stalin_xXx to Arthur, Clare, Daniel, David, Tora on 10 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Daniel Parsons

      Daniel Parsons answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      A lot of cooking is basically chemistry and just a series of chemical reactions! Knowing about chemistry can therefore help you to understand much more about what’s happening in the kitchen! – and also explain why your recipes sometimes go wrong!
      Take for example to chicken on my favourite type of pizza…the protein molecules in meat are bonded into coils, but as heat is applied the bonds break and the coils start to unwind. A lot of the water in the meat leaches out and iron oxidation occurs within the myglobin (like haemoglobin in your blood that carries oxygen around your body) in the meat, turning it from a pink when raw to a white colour when cooked!

    • Photo: Clare Harding

      Clare Harding answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      So here is my protocol for making pizza:
      1) Measure 1kg of white bread flour (containing starch (C6H12O6)n) (Tesco) and place into a large bowl
      2) Incubate 3×10^10 S. Saccharomyces cerevisiae with 3g NaCl (Sigma), 3g sucrose (Sigma) and 10ml CH3(CH2)7CH=CH(CH2)7COOH together for 2-4 minutes at room temperature
      3) Mix the flour and mixture from step 2 together, add 650ml distilled H2O and agitate vigorously for 10- -20 minutes
      4) Place into an open container and incubate at 28-30 oC for 90 minutes
      5) Agitate for a further 10 minutes and roll into flat, cicrular disks of between 15-20 cm diameter and 2-3cm thickness
      Add toppings and cook!

      The experiments we do in the lab are a lot like cooking, except we are not allowed to taste anything…

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