Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
Audiobook4 hours
Culinary Reactions: The Everyday Chemistry of Cooking
Written by Simon Quellen Field
Narrated by Sean Pratt
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
()
About this audiobook
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 microbes. And unlike in a laboratory, you can eat your experiments to verify your hypotheses. In Culinary Reactions, author Simon Quellen Field explores the chemistry behind the recipes you follow every day. 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 fall 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), and Lemonade with Chameleon Eggs (an acid indicator). It even shows you how to extract DNA from a Halloween pumpkin. You'll never look at your graduated cylinders, Bunsen burners, and beakers the same way again.
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Reviews for Culinary Reactions
Rating: 3.9255319234042556 out of 5 stars
4/5
47 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Exceptional information read in an engaging style. An essential for all chefs and those interested in food science.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I really enjoyed this book so much. I wish that portions of chemistry class would be taught through baking. It think it would give students a different visual that would help them understand it so much better. I ended up buying the book because I wanted to keep the recipes from it ?