Kitchen Chemistry

You\'ve been cooking like an idiot. You press on meat and compare it with the flesh on your hand to guess how rare it is; you throw spaghetti at the wall to see if it\'s done; you add an amount of salt that looks pretty when it\'s in your palm. If people made medicine this way, we\'d all be dead.

Home cooks are about to learn what Kraft Foods and McDonald\'s have known for more than 50 years: placing food over heat is science, not art. The resistance to food science (the phrase stinks of school cafeterias, Velveeta and those weird colored balls they sell at ball games as the dystopian "ice cream of the future") has grown stronger with the local, organic and slow-food movements. But resistance is futile. And misguided. "Maybe part of the fear is Soylent Green," says NYU chemistry professor Kent Kirshenbaum, who co-founded the Experimental Cuisine Collective, which explores scientific principles that can be applied to cooking — like finding a replacement for the powder from threatened orchid tubers that\'s used to make a stretchy Turkish ice cream called salep dondurma. "There\'s been some confusion about whether or not our approach toward taking a scientific understanding of foods has to do with artificial foods and the processing of foods." But Kirshenbaum is dedicated to fresh ingredients. You can have your organic vegetables and eat them as hydrocolloids too.

As fewer people actually do any cooking — because prepared dishes at supermarkets, meal-prep kitchens and restaurants will get even cheaper — the remaining brave cooks are going a little mad scientist. This paradigm shift won\'t be such a big deal in practice. Your oven is pretty much an advanced science gadget already, you use meat thermometers, and that measuring cup looks an awful lot like a beaker. You\'re just going to have to step it up a little: replace that liquid-measuring cup with a more accurate dry-weight scale; get a vacuum sealer like that FoodSaver gadget and a Crock-Pot that stays at a precise temperature so you can sous vide meat (which involves cooking it in a bag for a long time in a low-temperature water bath); learn how to use simple chemicals like agar-agar and xanthan gum (just better versions of gelatin and cornstarch, really); review a little high school chemistry. No big deal.

It\'s going to mean cooking a little more carefully, like you would bake. Which will be made easier through gadgetry. Speed ovens like the TurboChef circulate hot air at up to 60 m.p.h. (almost 100 km/h), making precise temperature changes so simple, you don\'t even know they\'re occurring. (A 31⁄2lb. [1 1/2 kg] chicken cooks in 14 min.) And induction cooktops are more than twice as energy efficient as gas burners, allowing for quicker temperature changes.

Sure, some cookbooks will need to be rewritten, but stuff is always getting updated online, so you won\'t even notice. "Transition temperatures for every protein in an egg or meat are pretty well known," says Harold McGee, author of On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. "In industries, that information is used to optimize processes. That kind of information hasn\'t entered the home kitchen yet. There\'s a pretty big difference between heating an egg at 60 C and 61 C." Kraft Foods knows that, and soon you will too. Whether you want to or not.

10个想法改变世界：厨房化学

你的厨艺曾经属于白痴级别。用手指按压肉片看它熟到什么程度；把意大利面往墙上扔，看是不是已经好了；盐放在手掌上，根据大概的估计决定要放多少。如果制药工序也是如此的话，我们早就死净了。

家里的掌勺应该了解这个卡夫食品和麦当劳50多年前就知道的事情：加工食品要以温度为基础，这个观点是科学的，不是说笑。食品科学反对派（一群人，他们厌恶学校食堂、Velveeta和如反乌托邦的“未来冰激凌”弹球游戏里出售的颜色怪异的小球）随着本地有机和细调慢烹食物运动的发展，逐渐壮大。但抵抗是徒劳的，并误入歧途。“部分恐惧可能来自《超世纪谍杀案》。”纽约大学化学教授Kent Kirshenbaum如是说。他是烹饪试验组织（Experimental Cuisine Collective）的创始人之一。该组织探究适用于烹饪的科学原理，例如寻找一种可以代替濒危的兰茎粉的物品——兰茎粉被用来制作一种粘粘的被称为兰茎粉Dondurma的土耳其冰激凌。“科学认识食物的工作是否与人造食品和加工食品结合，关于这一点意见并不统一。”但是Kirshenbaum致力于新鲜食材的研究。你也可以制作自己的水解胶体有机蔬菜。

几乎没有人在真正地烹饪——因为在超级市场、即时厨房和快餐店吃饭也很便宜——那些勇敢的烹饪者都是有些疯狂的科学家。这一转变实际上并不是大问题。烤箱都已经配备了高科技含量的小装置，还可以使用烤肉温度计，不过测量杯看起来很像烧杯。你只需要循序渐进的学习：用更精确的干重测量代替液体量杯；准备一个真空密封器如FoodSaver，还有Crock-Pot，它可以让你保持准确的温度，这样你就可以随时调整肉的情况（包括放在袋子里用低温水煮食的肉）；学习怎么使用一些简单的化学品，如洋粉、黄原胶（实际上是明胶和太白粉的升级版）；复习一下高中化学。除此之外没有什么要做的了。

正像你要完成的烧烤任务一样，烹饪变成需要小心行事的活动。通过使用各种小装置，会变得稍微容易些。快速烘焙箱如TurboChef，内部热空气的循环速度最高达到每小时60英里（大约是100公里/小时），精确调整温度也变得简单，你都感觉不到需要耗费什么时间。（一只一斤重的烤鸡制作需要14分钟。）并且智能烤炉比煤气烤箱效率高两倍以上，它的温度转换速度更快。

当然，一些烹饪书籍需要重写，但是在线资料也在不停更新，以致你来不及注意。“为不同的对象转变处理温度，不论它是鸡蛋还是肉类，机器知道得一清二楚。”《食物和烹饪：厨房里的科学》作者Harold McGee说，“在行业里，信息被用于完善产品。这些信息还没有进入厨房领域的。但是煮鸡蛋的温度控制在60度还是61度，的确有很大区别。”卡夫食品对此深信不疑，不久以后你也需要学习。不管你是否愿意。

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