Category: food science

We know sugar primarily as table sugar, or, more formally, as sucrose. It’s extracted from sugarcane or sugar beets and reduced down to a sweet white grain. In more scientific terms, sugar generally refers to the simplest members of a group of molecules called carbohydrates. Literally “watered carbon”, Carbohydrates are so named because they are made from carbon together with the two atoms that make water, hydrogen and oxygen. Carbohydrates are a very important group of molecules to the cook and in fact to all life as we know it. As Harold McGee explains in On Food and Cooking, “Carbohydrates...

  Introduction to the Maillard Reaction The Maillard reaction is the wonderful and complicated thing that happens when we heat foods that contain protein and some sugars. Under heat , the sugars react with amino acids -which are the building blocks of proteins-, and create a huge variety of new molecules. Food scientist Martin Lersch notes that the name is a not entirely accurate since the Maillard “reaction” is actually referring to “a surprisingly large number of reactions”, all starting from the heating of sugar with amino acids but creating all these myriad new molecules (Lersch, Martin. 2012). These molecules...

When we made ramen soup for the class we found a recipe from the “curious cook” often called a food chemist, Harlod McGee. McGee’s recipe instructed us to bake baking-soda for an hour apparently transforming it, through the loss of some water and CO2 molecules, into a new molecule called sodium carbonate. Apparently this sodium carbonate is a a more alkaline version of baking soda (which is already one of the more alkaline cooking ingredients we interact with regularly), and this alkaline white powder has a transformative effect on a basic flour and water noodle dough. We wanted to know...