Have you ever had to use science in a meal that you have cooked.

Question: Have you ever had to use science in a meal that you have cooked.
- Keywords:
  food
Asked by anon-361942 on 24 Apr 2023.
- Dmitry Dereshev answered on 24 Apr 2023:
  
  Plenty of times 🙂
  
  For one, as a powerlifter, I need to count my calories and measure my portions. Another thing is how to cook the food – air-frying a chicken, for example, keeps more juices in because of the science behind how it cooks the food.
  
  Storage is important too – some foods can be stored in the fridge/freezer for a while, and they are still tasty after that. You can figure this out based on what the food is made of.
- Emily Rose answered on 24 Apr 2023:
  
  What a great question! There’s lots of science in cooking. When you cook food in a frying pan, the browning of the food is called the Maillard reaction.
  
  A lot of the chemists I work with are good bakers. Baking is essentially chemistry, carefully measuring out ingredients and heating them to react. Luckily for me there is often lots of cake around the office.
- Iona Christie answered on 24 Apr 2023:
  
  I like to think of science as baking. You have to be exact in the ingredients you put in to create a successful cake, which is the same when dealing with chemicals in science. There is room to experiment in both baking and science but it does not mean your end product will always come out right
- Lisa Hursell answered on 24 Apr 2023:
  
  You use science without thinking about it – boiling a kettle, mixing ingredients – they’re all mini science experiments with tasty outcomes!
- Shanine Smith answered on 24 Apr 2023:
  
  Hi Harry
  
  Cooking is all about science, so many reactions happening!
  
  Some examples:
  When your toast gets brown this is know as the Maillard reaction.
  Milk gets sour and thick when making yoghurt this is called acidification.
  When your milk gets solid and turns into cheese this is known as coagulation.
  Turning dough into crackers is dehydration.
  When sugar is broken down by microorganisms to produce alcohol (beer) this is called fermentation.
  When you cook an egg and the white part turns from see-through to white this is known as protein denaturation.
  To make mayonnaise you need and egg or the oil and vinegar wont mix. The egg is an emulsifier and we call this reaction emulsification.
  
  Hope that gives you some food for thought! 🤣
  Cheers,
  Shanine
- Paula McMahon answered on 24 Apr 2023:
  
  Hi – don’t tell anyone but I’m actually an Engineer!! I think my planning skills come in handy in the kitchen all the time. And icing a cake does feel like plastering a wall 🙂
- Jo Montgomery answered on 24 Apr 2023:
  
  This is a brilliant question, Harry S! Science is everywhere, and especially in cooking! There are changing states, reversible and irreversible changes and all sorts going on!
  
  Solids may be melting to liquids, foods containing proteins may be denaturing – like when you fry an egg and the gloopy clear egg white turns solid and white (an irreversible change, we can’t change it back), or even something called the Maillard reaction – where sugars in foods caramelise and turn brown and tasty!
  
  One of my favourite science things to cook is cheese sauce – where you use a tiny bit of flour, milk and butter and as you heat it, the gluten in the flour causes the sauce to thicken… then you can add some delicious cheese, which melts into the sauce!
- Ling Lim answered on 24 Apr 2023:
  
  That’s so interesting! When pan-frying meat, I will add salt at the very end, since salt dehydrates (removes water) meat, thus making it dry! Also, when making omelette/scramble eggs, I add a few drops of water while beating the eggs. During cooking, the water turns to steam, which in turn traps air, thus making the cooked egg mixture light and fluffy.
- Amanda Cruchley answered on 24 Apr 2023:
  
  I love cooking and one of my favourite meals is Mac & Cheese. I add mustard to my Mac & Cheese because it is what is known as an emulsifier. You know when you add oil to water the two don’t mix together. An emulsifier That means that it helps mix things that can’t usually mix and also helps them stay that way. It means I can add more cheese to my sauce without the oil separating and I like my sauce extra cheesy!
- Dafni Moschidou answered on 25 Apr 2023:
  
  I find that baking, especially cakes, is very similar to carrying out science experiments. You need to follow the recipe quite closely, like an experiment protocol, otherwise the cake will not rise or will not have the right consistency. Using rising agents like baking powder or yeast is an experiment in itself – you need to get the conditions just right to get a good result!
- Santosh Mahabala answered on 25 Apr 2023:
  
  Great question.
  
  Cooking combines chemistry, physics and biology.
  
  For example, when we cut vegetables, we increase their surface area so that they cook well.
  
  Pickling is another example, where one needs to add right portions of the ingredients to get the right taste and shelf time.
  
  I will quote my example, my mother used to pickle a green vegetable, which used to go bad with mould within a week. Indian pickles usually last months. So, the next time she was making a pickle, I added an extra spoon of salt to it before storing. It stayed on. So, we changed the recipe and started adding this extra spoon of salt.
- Camilla Cassidy answered on 27 Apr 2023:
  
  There is a really popular cook book (that has a Netflix show by the same name, that I’d recommend) called Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. The book’s author Samin Nosrat explains that there are general principles in cooking that make food cook well and taste good, and she explains the reasons for that. Fat – like butter, ghee or oil – is needed to avoid things sticking, and help conduct heat. Acid is sharp and cuts through the fat to avoid making the taste or mouth feel of the food unpleasant. Our tongues need saliva to let us taste food – the saliva is what lets the chemicals of taste contact our tongues – so food should always contain some salt because that helps it taste its best to us. You can think of principles like this as like scientific theories – there are good, explainable reasons being them, and its a consensus we’ve come through by lots of testing and understanding what is really happening.
- Rodrigo Bammann answered on 3 May 2023:
  
  All the time!
  
  Science is not just the knowledge that you have. It is also experimenting in a methodical way, observing the results, and improving the experiment if you got different results than you expected. Which happens when you are cooking, right?
  
  You follow a protocol (recipe), and you get your results (the food). Then you start asking questions like “what if I do something different?”. And you get your new results!
- Áine Uí Ghiollagáin answered on 28 May 2023:
  
  Every time you cook you are taking organic materials, combining them and changing their state. So it’s like doing chemistry every time you cook from scratch!

Question: Have you ever had to use science in a meal that you have cooked.

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