The Scientist and the Cook: Mind-Opening Recipes - Fascinating Processes

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In all planning and cooking, you need to be aware of what degrades faster and under what conditions, mostly through experience, to plan well.  Bean sprouts don't keep fresh, so use those early in the week or you have a bitter mess of watery greens late in the week.  Canned ingredients are good in the last few days before you go shopping.  Using raw ingredients and dried beans and unprepared foods saves a ton of money, but may sacrifice time.  However, the time you spend cooking can be used to be with your family and to continue to grow together. 

On this point of cooking and time, my son often stands on a step stool next to me at our island stove and wants to smell all the spices, peel the carrots, ask about why each ingredient is going in, and I know no better way to fill time while being productive than working with him as a 4-year old to make a meal.  As an aside, just today, he was taking a bath and came out into our kitchen to get two measuring cups from the drawer there to take back to my wife in the bathroom.  I later sat in with him while he finished his bath and he was talking mostly to himself saying, "I mix the 'banzo beans with the soy juice and then I need a little more..." as he poured water back and forth among the measuring cups and his "food processor" – a metal coffee cup he had also taken from the kitchen.  I'm not sure what he is getting from all our interactions, but it's clear he's learning a language and a way of thinking about food at a very basic level.

You have used bread-making as an example of the chemical processes that go on behind common food-making procedures.  How do the ingredients used to make bread display the fascinating chemical processes that bring about the final product?

Bread is fascinating and I'm just a practitioner and not an expert or even theoretician on how to do it well... Keep that in mind as I respond to this question.

I was recently told by a medical specialist that I needed to eliminate simple starches from my diet as much as possible, in addition to sugars.  However, there are so many foods out there and recipes out there that I want to eat; I needed to replace ingredients with minimal effect on final taste.  Chemical engineering led me to many successes.

Many whole wheat bread recipes call for some white flour.  This is for a couple of reasons, but if you think about the engineering, you can achieve the same result with a mix of other methods.  A pure whole wheat flour bread rises so much more slowly, and is tougher than a mix of flours.  So, you can either let it rise longer, but then when you punch it down, the wheat gluten is still very developed and you have a tougher loaf (appropriate for some recipes).  Or, you can mix in some soy flour or garbanzo bean flour or something else and let it rise less and then it comes out "lighter" in texture and in less time.
 
On the topic of temperature, when we first moved here, I was thinking about how great it was going to be to let our dough rise outside on our Tucson patio since it was so warm and the rising step would go much faster (most chemical transformations, starches to carbon dioxide that adds all those fluffy bubbles to your bread), are about doubled for every ten degree rise in temperature.  I was envisioning making bread that would rise in 20 minutes or less... Two things caused problems with this and they are obvious with our family background... You can't expect a normal bread to rise without a crust if you don’t have a ton of excess water in the towel; wet is needed, not just damp, when you cover the dough for rising.  A tough skin forms that isn't very good when you just use a damp towel in the desert.  The other problem was that my wife is a veterinarian:  you can't expect a bowl full of rising bread with a towel over it on your side patio to remain "dog-free" for long...  I came around the corner of the house to bring the dough in and our terrier had her head under the completely dry towel, as she wagged her tail and chowed down on the dry-skinned dough.