Kitchen Mysteries
Revealing the Science of Cooking
by Herve This
Columbia University Press, 2007
$22.95, cloth
224 pages
With foams, gels, and bubbles coming out of the trendiest restaurant kitchens, even home cooks are looking at their blenders and freezers with a fresh eye, wondering about the limits of eggs, gelatin, and flour.
A little chemical guidance from Herve This' Kitchen Mysteries could ensure success with classic recipes and even inspire you to push the culinary envelope. This, a French chemist, covered similar ground in his first book, Molecular Gastronomy, and here he continues his exploration of the chemistry behind everyday cooking.
His kitchen-lab tests range from the most basic and even ancient techniques and ingredients - salting, roasting, milk, and bread - to a few more challenging ones, like the egg in all its incarnations, wine, and aspics.
The mysteries This seeks to explain are the chemical reasons behind rules passed down from experienced cooks. Rather than accepting the answer "because that's the way my mother (or grandmother, or uncle, or other experienced cook) did it, This finds and shares quick scientific explanations. If you know why a technique works you can be confident of success, modify your actions to the tools at hand, and even break the rules to create a new dish.
This is no lab-coated automaton. He is inspired by the noted gourmand Antoine Brillat-Savarin, who wrote for example, "One can become a cook, but one is born a roaster," an aphorism that inspires This to explore roasting a turkey so the white meat stays tender and the stuffing doesn't kill you. This will make us all better cooks and roasters whether born to it or not.
He also makes it clear that his is not a diet approach. He seems to enjoy food too much to parse its calories, but also writes that measures of proteins, carbohydrates, and trace chemicals do not answer his fundamental question - how does cooking transform food to make it not only digestible but delicious.
So here are some answers. Food to be deep fried must be dried so the oil's heat is spent cooking the food, not evaporating excess moisture. Suddenly the paper towel blotting that just seemed like a fussy extra step makes perfect sense and you can almost taste the crispy brown crust.
We are always told not to store fresh tomatoes in the fridge, but never why. Leave them on the open counter and they won't be trapped with the ethylene gas that triggers their ripening, but also speeds their rotting.
From the intricacies of sauce emulsions to the seeming simplicity of salads, from smelly cheese to fresh eggs, This offers succinct and clear explanations for what you are doing whether it's making a cake or opening a bottle of wine. To decant or not to decant, that is only one of the questions This answers.
If you've mastered bread making and egg boiling, read here to find out what you've been doing right. If you are ready for some high-wire kitchen acts, This has recipes, or shall we say formulas, for instant ice cream - first get some liquid nitrogen, or for making your own fruit wine - use any fruit you please, but choose your yeast carefully.
This has made invisible processes visible, revealed the mysteries, and the bread has risen, baked, and been enjoyed.
© 2007 Claudia Kousoulas
