Cooking Chemistry

I love cooking and it's one of my favorites hobbies. The cooking books I am used to are all about recipes and when I saw the cover of Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat, it really called my attention. I had never seen something about the history of cooking and how things have changed until bring modern cooking.  Nevertheless, I had never paid much thought on how we came to know cooking as it is nowadays. I always imaged people in middle ages with copper pots, cooking more rudimentarily than us, but never gave much thought to the details of cooking.  This first chapter has brought me with a lot of insight on how pots and pans came to be today, and specially what called my attention was the discovery of stainless steel.

 Chafing(n):  a dish that is used for cooking
or warming food at the table

Have you ever thought the chemistry behind why our food sticks to our pans? I absentmindedly add oil or butter to my non-teflon pans so my food doesn't stick. This book made me realize why my food sticks to the pan. Thing that really opened my mind. Proteins from our food bond with molecules from the metal in our pans not only making it stick to the metal, but also gain that metal after taste to it. According to Wilson, "stickiness happens when food bonds with the surface of the pan" (Pg. 32), so in order to prevent food from sticking you have to "stirring [the food] it so vigilantly that it doesn't get a chance to stick, or by introducing a protective layer between the food and the pan" (Pg. 32). Only after Teflon was found this problem was solved. Teflon is short name for a molecule made solely from carbon and fluorine atoms. Their attractiveness is so high that they rather bond to themselves than to other elements, making it non-stick, and providing the food with an insulation layer to prevent the metal aftertaste. I had never in my life though about this before. I never thought it had to do with chemistry, but now I do. 

Science is everywhere, and without it we wouldn't be where we are nowadays. I had never realized how important it was until I realized it affected very ordinary things like cooking. To people cooking is something common and mandatory; it is everything but technological. To some it is primitive and we cant live without it, but cooking is a science as much as it is an art. Cooking pots as simple as they look have their science, and chemistry. Without science, we would still be cooking from pits in the ground.