Ha... nice topic!  Me doing the cooking usually, I've given it some thoughts as
well.
In general, writing recipe details down, weighing ingredients and monitoring temperature and time enhances reproducibility, similar to chemistry. In
contrast to chemistry though, I guess flavor perception and molecular flavour composition are somewhat more subjective to individual taste and less
reproducible. For chemical reactions there usually is a reasonable prediction for the outcome and product of the reaction (In reality this is highly
debatable IMO  ), which might not apply to this extend for cooking. Wines are a
good example, I actually never made any wine that ever tasted EXACTLY the same as a previous one. The grapes composition probably depending on soil
nutrition, amount of sun and rain, time of harvest, microorganism present, all interacting with the fermentation and aging process to make the flavour
profile a pretty unique one and hard to reproduce due to the many more interacting factors present as opposed to most controlled reactions in
chemistry.
Natural flavour molecules are usually a complex mixture of different compounds, each having their own boiling point, volatility, temperature/pH
stability, susceptibility to oxidation etc. When distilling wines this becomes pretty obvious, the flavour of each fraction (depending on the fruit
used) is usually slightly different, like a chromatography column separating all the different fractions of flavour molecules. Some fruit flavours
hardly come over, even for pot stills, guessing that their boiling point has a big influence.
During cooking the same thing happens I guess, the flavour of curry mixtures change immensely depending on how long it was cooked and under which
conditions. For many curry's for example, it seems that (like in chemistry) the addition order of the "reactants", cooking time and "reflux"
conditions or not, can have a big influence on the taste of the final dish. Cook them too long and vigorously, and all the flavour molecules will
make your house smell great instead of the dish. Garlic for example will have almost no taste left when baked in the oven for a long time, probably
due to high volatility/reactivity of the flavour molecules present.
So there are probably some similarities between cooking and chemistry, although the first is more like learning a language and the second (somewhat)
more of a science.
[Edited on 24-12-2019 by nitro-genes] |
