On wooden vs. plastic cutting boards: "It turns out that wooden cutting boards are good in a couple of ways — they're porous so they tend to soak up juices from cutting meats and fish, for example, and that carries the bacteria down into the cutting board where they're not at the surface anymore. And woods often contain anti-bacterial compounds in them so there's kind of a natural antibiotic in the surface of the wood. Plastic cutting boards are easier to clean and are safer to put in the dishwasher, for example, but they also will tend to develop scars and bacteria will lodge in the scars and cause problems later. So I actually have a couple of each and use both. When a plastic cutting board develops scars, I replace it." The Buffalo The water buffalo is relatively unfamiliar in the West but the most important bovine in tropical Asia. Bubalus bubalis was domesticated as a draft animal in Mesopotamia around 3000 BCE, then taken to the Indus civilizations of present-day Pakistan, and eventually through India and China. This tropical animal is sensitive to heat (it wallows in water to cool down), so it proved adaptable to milder climates. The Arabs brought buffalo to the Middle East around 700 CE, and in the Middle Ages they were introduced throughout Europe. The most notable vestige of that introduction is a population approaching 100,000 in the Campagna region south of Rome, which supplies the milk for true mozzarella cheese, mozzarella di bufala. Buffalo milk is much richer than cow's milk, so mozzarella and Indian milk dishes are very different when the traditional buffalo milk is replaced with cow's milk.

The logic of this trend is obvious: it's a waste of its resources for the body to produce an enzyme when it's no longer needed; and once most mammals are weaned, they never encounter lactose in their food again. But if an adult without much lactase activity does ingest a substantial amount of milk, then the lactose passes through the small intestine and reaches the large intestine, where bacteria metabolize it, and in the process produce carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and methane: all discomforting gases. Sugar also draws water from the intestinal walls, and this causes a bloated feeling or diarrhea. It was vastly overstated. It was true, sometimes, of certain nutrients in certain vegetables, but not across the board. Then I talked with some plant physiologists, who explained that plants are very adaptable creatures and if you change their growing conditions they're going to change their metabolism, and it's not all in one direction. Their feeling was that a lot of the things that are useful in plant foods, such as antioxidants, are made by the plant in response to stress."Stafford, Matthew, SF Weekly (November 24, 2004). On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen McGee, Harold J.; Long, Sharon R.; Briggs, Winslow R. (1984). "Why whip egg whites in copper bowls?". Nature. 308 (5960): 667–668. Bibcode: 1984Natur.308..667M. doi: 10.1038/308667a0. S2CID 4372579. The Whey Proteins Subtract the four caseins from the milk proteins, and the remainder, numbering in the dozens, are the whey proteins. Where the caseins are mainly nutritive, supplying amino acids and calcium for the calf, the whey proteins include defensive proteins, molecules that bind to and transport other nutrients, and enzymes. The most abundant one by far is lactoglobulin, whose biological function remains a mystery. It's a highly structured protein that is readily denatured by cooking. It unfolds at 172°F/78°C, when its sulfur atoms are exposed to the surrounding liquid and react with hydrogen ions to form hydrogen sulfide gas, whose powerful aroma contributes to the characteristic flavor of cooked milk (and many other animal foods).

Keeping Micelles Separate...One member of the casein family is especially influential in these gatherings. That is kappa-casein, which caps the micelles once they reach acertain size, prevents them from growing larger, and keeps them dispersed and separate. One end of the capping-casein molecule extends from the micelle out into the surrounding liquid, and forms a "hairy layer" with a negative electrical charge that repels other micelles. McGee, Harold (1987). "Trials of the gluttons for punishment". Nature. 326 (6116): 907–908. Bibcode: 1987Natur.326..907M. doi: 10.1038/326907a0. There are three basic methods for pasteurizing milk. The simplest is batch pasteurization, in which a fixed volume of milk, perhaps a few hundred gallons, is slowly agitated in a heated vat at a minimum of 145°F/62°C for 30 to 35 minutes. Industrial-scale operations use the high-temperature, short-time (HTST) method, in which milk is pumped continuously through a heat exchanger and held at a minimum of 162°F/72°C for 15 seconds. The batch process has a relatively mild effect on flavor, while the HTST method is hot enough to denature around 10% of the whey proteins and generate the strongly aromatic gas hydrogen sulfide (p. 87). Though this "cooked" flavor was considered a defect in the early days, U.S. consumers have come to expect it, and dairies now often intensify it by pasteurizing at well above the minimum temperature; 171°F/77°C is commonly used. On Food and Cooking is a unique blend of culinary lore and scientific explanation that examines food -- its history, its make-up, and its behavior when we cook it, cool it, dice it, age it, or otherwise prepare it for eating. Generously spiced with historical and literary anecdote, it covers all the major food categories, from meat and potatoes to sauce béarnaise and champagne. Easy-to-understand scientific explanations throw light on such mysteries as why you can whip cream but not milk what makes white meat white whether searing really seals in flavor how to tell stale eggs from fresh why "fruits" ripen and "vegetables" don't how to save a sauce what hops do and what happens when you knead dough. A chapter on nutrition reveals that Americans have been obsessed with their diet since the 1800s and exposes the fallacies behind food fads past and present. There's a section on additives -- a not-so-new addition to food -- and taste and smell, our two pleasure-giving versions of the oldest sense on earth. With more than 200 illustrations, including extraordinary photographs of food taken through the electron microscope, this book will delight and fascinate anyone who has ever cooked, savored, or wondered about food"--Publisher description

Most readers today have at least a vague idea of proteins and fats, molecules and energy, and a vague idea is enough to follow most of the explanations in the first 13 chapters, which cover common foods and ways of preparing them. Chapters 14 and 15 then describe in some detail the molecules and basic chemical processes involved in all cooking; and the Appendix gives a brief refresher course in the basic vocabulary of science. You can refer to these final sections occasionally, to clarify the meaning of pH or protein coagulation as you're reading about cheese or meat or bread, or else read through them on their own to get a general introduction to the science of cooking. McGee was born on 3 October 1951 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Louise (Hanney) and Charles Gilbert McGee, raised in Elmhurst, Illinois, and educated at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), initially studying astronomy, [4] [9] but graduating with a B.S. in Literature in 1973. He went on to do a Ph.D. on the romantic poetry of John Keats supervised by Harold Bloom at Yale University, graduating in 1978. [1] [8] Career [ edit ]

a b McGee, Harold James (1978). Keats and the Progress of Taste (PhD thesis). Yale University. ProQuest 302889235. qlacross, about one-fiftieth the size of a fat globule. Around a tenth of the volume of milk is taken up by casein micelles. Much of the calcium in milk is in the micelles, where it acts as a kind of glue holding the protein molecules together. One portion of calcium binds individual protein molecules together into small clusters of 15 to 25. Another portion then helps pull several hundred of the clusters together to form the micelle (which is also held together by the water-avoiding hydrophobic portions of the proteins bonding to each other). urn:lcp:onfoodcookingsci0000mcge:epub:caa9698d-eee4-4e34-820e-9df9cad02829 Foldoutcount 0 Grant_report Arcadia #4281 Identifier onfoodcookingsci0000mcge Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t4xh85h65 Invoice 2089 Isbn 0684181320 This is a truly epic book. It covers food from every relevant angle: gastronomically, biologically, chemically, historically, culturally. It's exhaustive and, as a result, can be exhausting sometimes. It took a month of fairly regular reading to finish, and I skipped some parts. But if you read this book from cover to cover, you probably should skip some of it, too. It covers so many aspects of nourishment that while you're basically guaranteed to find parts that are interesting or intriguing to you, you're also likely to run into parts that don't grip you that much. So skip the latter and dwell on the former to get the most enjoyment. And it makes for a good reference book, if you ever feel like learning about some given food or cooking process. Sterilized milk has been heated at 230-250°F/110-121°C for 8 to 30 minutes; it is even darker and stronger in flavor, and keeps indefinitely at room temperature.Milk owes its milky opalescence to microscopic fat globules and protein bundles, which are just large enough to deflect light rays as they pass through the liquid. Dissolved salts and milk sugar, vitamins, other proteins, and traces of many other compounds also swim in the water that accounts for the bulk of the fluid. The sugar, fat, and proteins are by far the most important components, and we'll look at them in detail in a moment.

McGee's scientific approach to cooking has been embraced and popularized by chefs and authors such as David Chang [23] and J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. [24] Personal life [ edit ] By plant stress, he means things such as keeping them underwatered, which – the Chinese tiger mother approach – can, says McGee, produce better results than spoiling the plant. "Dry-farmed tomatoes are highly prized. The farmers give the plants water, then turn off the irrigation, and the plant ripens only the fruits it can manage to, and everything is more concentrated."

Table of Contents

Technical innovation has radical consequences on how and what we eat. In the 17th century, cooks discovered that beating egg whites in copper bowls gave body and volume to exciting new foams which they could set as meringues and soufflés. Not much earlier, a very bright cook worked out how to replace a sheep's stomach with a floured cloth for boiling puddings - hello hasty pudding, Christmas pudding, Sussex pond pudding and that entire British repertoire of merry stodge. And a few years later, Denys Papin demonstrated the "digester" or proto-pressure cooker, turning bones to pap in hours. These were big steps, and their like may be multiplied all the way to the microwave and the mechanical blender, but it's not exactly the men-in-white-coats image we now have of kitchen science. Cooking with Milk Much of the milk that we use in the kitchen disappears into a mixture -- a batter or dough, a custard mix or a pudding -- whose behavior is largely determined by the other ingredients. The milk serves primarily as a source of moisture, but also contributes flavor, body, sugar that encourages browning, and salts that encourage protein coagulation.