I'm Just Here for the Food_ Version 2.0 - Alton Brown [4]
Recipes are written so that if you follow them to the letter the dish will succeed. This doesn’t mean that if you don’t follow them to the letter you won’t succeed, either. And if you do mess up a few dishes in the name of education—hey, it’s only food.
WHY BOTHER COOKING?
Early man ate critters raw, so why change? There are a couple of very good reasons. Heat breaks down meat and vegetable fibers alike, making them a heck of a lot easier to chew and digest. Heat kills parasites and microorganisms that can do nasty things. And heat makes foods taste better.
Many physical and chemical changes take place during cooking, from the caramelization of sugars to the coagulation of proteins. Cooking also causes chemical reactions by breaking down cell walls that normally keep reactive substances away from one another. When they do combine, these substances may give birth to a vast brood of new flavor elements. Garlic, for example, only tastes the way it does when it is cooked because two rather simple chemicals combine and then fraction to create hundreds of new compounds.
Finally, the tongue does a better job of tasting when the food to be tasted is warm. (If you don’t believe this, take two scoops of ice cream and microwave one of them until warm and soupy. Taste it alongside the frozen scoop. The warm liquid will taste much sweeter.)
In recent years, the raw food movement has grown strong, especially in California. While I can appreciate what its proponents are attempting to do, it seems to me that the evolution of our species hinged on our ability to use fire, not only for heat and protection, but also to cook food, thus liberating more of the available nutrients.
Heat
A lot of the ink in this book is dedicated to the pondering of heat. If cooking is itself defined by the application of heat, then it seems to me that a smart cook would want to know as much as possible about this force. Here’s a brief primer.
THE LOWDOWN ON HEAT
Through the ages a lot of great gray matter has pondered the nature of heat and come up with the wrong answer. As recently as the late eighteenth century, heat was still thought to be a kind of invisible liquid, which was dubbed “caloric.” Then, a guy titled Count Rumford, who happened to be the war minister of Bavaria (even though he was an American), noticed that when cannon barrels were drilled, the same amount of heat was produced regardless of the amount of material involved. He deduced from this that heat and movement are closely related, and since heat can be harnessed to do work and can travel through a vacuum, it must be a form of energy. As a reward, Rumford had a baking powder named after him.
At its most basic, heat can be described as energy. If an object is hot, you can bet its molecules are in motion. This motion can be set off by:
Chemical reaction. The temperature of the human body is the result of chemical reactions—our consumption and digestion of food is tallied in calories, which are actually units of heat.
Mechanical friction. Rub two sticks together and you get heat; get enough of it and you can make fire. Heat is also created by the friction of electrons moving through a metal coil that provides some resistance. The cigarette lighter in your car and the coils of an electric cook top work this way. And when you place a metal pan on that coil, electrons move through it and heat the pan as well.
Radiant energy. Although those versed in quantum physics would argue the point all the live-long day, for the humble cook let it suffice to say that radiation simply refers to energy that travels in waves, be they visible (photoelectrons) or not (microwaves). Waves create heat by vibrating the molecules they hit. Light waves