The SCIENCE of COOKING - Dr.Stuart Farrimond
TASTE & FLAVOUR
Why do we cook?
To think of cooking as purely functional would be to look at just one aspect of it.
There are various reasons to cook food, but essentially our very existence pivot on our ability to cook. Cooking makes food more edible and, in so doing, cuts down on the time it takes to digest it. Great apes, our primate ancestors, spend 80 per cent of their day chewing food. Learning to grind, puree, dry, or preserve food help us to digest it more speedily, but it was the advent of cooking, at least one million years ago, that enabled us to spend less time chewing and digesting food and more time thinking and focusing on other pursuits. Today, we spend just five per cent of our day eating. So how else does cooking food benefit us?
It makes food safe - Cooking destroys bacteria, microbes, and many of the toxins these produce. Raw meat and fish can be render safe, and heat destroys many plant toxins, such as the deadly substance, phytohaemagglutinin, in kidney beans.
Flavours multiply - Cooking makes food taste incredible. Heat browns meats, vegetables, breads, and cakes; caramelizes sugars; and releases locked-in flavours from herbs and spices in a process known as the Maillard reaction (see^pp16-17).
Cooking helps digestion - Fat melts, chewy connective tissue in meat softens into nutritious gelatin, and proteins unravel, or “denature”, from their tightly coiled structure into ones that digestive enzymes can break down more easily.
Starches are softened - When heated in water, clustered granules of hard-to-digest carbohydrates unravel and soften. This “gelatinization” of energy-dense starches transforms vegetables and cereal flours so the intestines can easily process them.
Nutrients are released - Without cooking foods to break down their starches, significant amounts of a food's nourishment are locked up in “resistant” starch that cannot be digested. Heating also forces some of the vitamins and minerals that are confined inside cells to be liberated, increasing how much of these essential substances the body can absorb.
It helps us socialize - The ritual of cooking and sharing is entrenched in our psyche, bringing families and friends together. Research shows that regularly eating with others improves wellbeing.
“Cooked food taste incredible. Cooking releases locked-in flavour and brings new textures to foods.”
