Kitchen Chemistry（转）

sxzu

You’ve been cooking like an idiot. You press on meat and compare it with the flesh on your hand to guess how rare it is; you throw spaghetti at the wall to see if it’s done; you add an amount of salt that looks pretty when it’s in your palm. If people made medicine this way, we’d all be dead.
        Home cooks are about to learn what Kraft Foods and McDonald’s have known for more than 50 years: placing food over heat is science, not art. The resistance to food science (the phrase stinks of school cafeterias, Velveeta and those weird colored balls they sell at ball games as the dystopian “ice cream of the future”) has grown stronger with the local, organic and slowfood movements. But resistance is futile, and misguided. “Maybe part of the fear Soylent Green,” says NYU chemistry professor Kent Kirshenbaum, who co-founded the Experimental Cuisine Collective, which explores scientific principles that can be applied to cooking. “There’s been some confusion about whether or not our approach toward taking a scientific understanding of foods has to do with artificial foods and the processing of foods.”
        As fewer people actually do any cooking—because prepared dished at supermarkets, meal-prep kitchens and restaurants will get even cheaper—the remaining brave cooks are going a little mad scientist. This paradigm shift won’t be such a big deal in practice. Your oven is pretty much an advanced science gadget already, you use meat thermometers, and that measuring cup looks an awful lot like a beaker. You’re just going to have to stop it up a little: replace that liquid—measuring cup with a more accurate dry—weight scale; get a vacuum sealer like that FoodSaver gadget and a Crock-Pot that stays at a precise temperature so you can vide meat (which involves cooking it in a bag for a long time in a low-temperature water bath); learn how to use simple chemicals like agar-agar and xanthan gum (just better versions of gelatin and cornstarch, really); review a little high school chemistry. No big deal.
        It’s going to mean cooking a little more carefully, like you would bake. Which will be made easier through gadgetry. Speed ovens like the TurboChef circulate hot air at up to 60m.p.h. (almost 100km/h), making precise temperature changes so simple, you don’t even know they’re occurring. (A 1.5kg chicken cooks in 14min.) And induction cook-tops are more than twice as energy efficient as gas burners, allowing for quicker temperature changes.
        Sure, some cookbooks will need to be rewritten, but stuff is always getting updated online, so you won’t even notice. “Transition-temperature for every protein in an egg or meat are pretty well known,” says Harold McGee, author of On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. “In industries, that information is used to optimize processes. That kind of information hasn’t entered the home kitchen yet. There’s a pretty big difference between heating an egg at 60 degrees C and 61 degrees C.” Kraft Foods knows that, and soon you will to. Whether you want to or not.
（转自《参考消息》翻译的某篇文章）

sxzu

厨房化学
       你一直在像一个傻子一样烹调。你压一压肉，把它跟你手上的肉对比，推测煎的嫩不嫩；把意式面条往锅壁上贴一贴看看煮没煮熟；抓一把盐在手心里看看差不多适量便撒下去。假如按这种方式制药，那我们大家就都没命了（其实这也是现代科技里流行的“模糊技术”——sxzu注）。
       家庭厨师将会明白卡夫食品公司和麦当劳50多年前就已经知道的一件事：加热食品是门科学，不是艺术。伴随着崇尚本土、有机和慢餐的潮流，食品科学受到的抵制日益强烈（这个词组让人想起学校自助食堂、卡夫芝士马铃薯和棒球比赛现场出售的那些号称反乌托邦“未来冰激凌”的颜色怪异的小球球）。但抵制没用，也不对。纽约大学教授肯特•柯申鲍姆与人合作创办了试验性烹饪合作社，探索可用于烹调的科学管理。他说：“害怕心理或许在一定程度上起因于影片《伊索伦特公司》（美国上世纪70年代科幻影片，内容是在人类食物短缺的2022年，纽约市生产人造食品的真相——《参考消息》注），人们一直有点搞不清我们主张以科学的态度看待食品是否与人造食品和食品加工有关。”
       真正烹调的人越来越少——因为超市里的半成品菜、配餐厨房和饭馆会越来越便宜——剩下的有勇气的厨师成了有点疯狂的科学家。这种方法的根本变化在实践中并不是什么大不了的事。你的炉子已经是非常先进的高科技产品了，你用着肉类温度计和酷似实验室烧杯的量杯。你只需要稍稍再提升一步：用更加精确的干重秤替换液体量杯；买一个像FoodSaver（美国真空封装机品牌——《参考消息》注）的真空封装机和一个Crock-Pot牌精确温度慢烧锅，这样你就可以把肉类进行真空包装（包括把肉装在袋子里用低温隔水炖锅长时间加热）；学习使用简单的化学品，比如琼脂和黄原胶（其实跟明胶和玉米淀粉的作用一样，只不过质量要好一些）；稍稍温习一下高中化学。仅此而已。
       这会意味着烹饪时要小心谨慎一些，就跟烘烤食品一样，使用精巧装置会比较容易做到这一点。像TurboChef牌的快速烤箱传热速度高达每小时60英里（将近100km/h），精准的温度改变轻而易举，你根本不知道有这回事儿在发生。（一只3斤重的鸡需要14分钟烤熟。）电磁感应炉面比煤气炉节能一半以上，温度变化更快。
       诚然，有些食谱需要改写，但网上的东西总在更新，你都来不及去注意。《论食品与烹饪：厨房的学问与知识》一书的作者哈罗得•麦吉说：“鸡蛋或肉里每一种蛋白质的转变温度是众所周知的，工业上利用这些信息来优化加工方法。这种信息迄今为止还没有进入家庭厨房。以60℃和以61℃加热鸡蛋是有巨大差别的。”卡夫食品公司知道这点，很快你也会知道的。不管你想不想知道。（其实我们中国人几千年前就已经掌握这点了，我们的中餐有多好就不用多说了吧——sxzu注）

[ 本帖最后由 sxzu 于 2010-1-28 17:24 编辑 ]

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