Culinary Reactions

The Everyday Chemistry of Cooking

By: Simon Quellen Field

Narrated by: Sean Pratt

When you're cooking, you're a chemist! Every time you follow or modify a recipe you are experimenting with acids and bases, emulsions and suspensions, gels and foams. In your kitchen you denature proteins, crystallize compounds, react enzymes with substrates, and nurture desired microbial life while suppressing harmful microbes. And unlike in a laboratory, you can eat your experiments to verify your hypotheses.

In Culinary Reactions, author Simon Quellen Field explores the chemistry behind the recipes you follow every day. How does altering the ratio of flour, sugar, yeast, salt, butter, and water affect how high bread rises? Why is whipped cream made with nitrous oxide rather than the more common carbon dioxide? And why does Hollandaise sauce fall for "clarified" butter? This easy-to-follow primer even includes recipes to demonstrate the concepts being discussed, including Whipped Creamsicle Topping (a foam), Cherry Dream Cheese (a protein gel), and Lemonade with Chameleon Eggs (an acid indicator). It even shows you how to extract DNA from a Halloween pumpkin. You'll never look at your graduated cylinders, Bunsen burners, and beakers the same way again.

©2012 Simon Quellen Field (P)2017 Tantor

Critic reviews

“With information advanced enough to interest the well-seasoned, hard-boiled home cook, the information in this book is written in such a friendly and approachable manner that even beginner kitchen-chemists will be delighted to learn from it." ( San Francisco Book Review)

Simple, yet interesting

I enjoyed the wide variety of culinary tips. It was a good and interesting listen.

Fascinating, if a little dense

Though densely packed with information, this book presents the concepts of chemistry in cooking in a very accessible manner. Occasionally, the book provides hacks to help cooking, but it is more geared toward providing a gee whiz understanding of the chemistry governing cooking.

Students of chemistry will note an occasional oversimplifying of concepts, such as referring to pH as ‘percent hydrogen,’ instead of a logarithmic scale. However, most concepts are presented clearly and accurately.

There was one factual error that I am aware of. When discussing cis and trans fats, it indicates that the cis form (hydrogens on the same side of the double bond) is favored. In reality, the trans form (hydrogen atoms on opposite sides of the double bond) is favored due to a repulsion of the larger electron clouds surrounding the carbon groups.

The reason the molecule stays in the cis arrangement has to do with the nature of the double bond. Though carbon-carbon single bonds can freely rotate, double bonds lock the groups in place. This prevents the bond from rotating to the more favorable trans shape.

BEST AUDIO

For as fun as all sorts of chemistry is… I DO NOT like reading about chemistry. This narrator - wow, amazing. Love the intonation and run expressions used here. Great read. Fascinating content too - and actually interesting because it literally sounds interesting.

his ability to explain the chemistry so coherently is greatly appreciated and amazing.

incredible book for those cooks who want a chemistry way of understanding food and cooking.

This was a fun n listen

If you are into chemistry and science and you love food this is a great book. If you have a burgeoning interest this book is great. I loved this as a fun listen especially the recipes. I have a science background so some of the basics which he goes through (quite well and in an easy manner to understand) I knew but a lot I didn’t and I tend to be an intuitive cook. But this was just so fun to know- like adult chemistry set in my kitchen! I read his other book Gut Reactions and didn’t like it the way I LOVE this one. Have fun with it!