Summertime and plenty of time to practice your skills in the kitchen, starting with some basics:
Cooking impacts the structure, smell, color, nutrient content and the taste experience of your guests. This might easily give you the impression that there are an endless number of ways that you can prepare fodd for eating. However, on a molecular level, there are only really six ways to cook:
• Coagulating – When you heat protein the fibers attach to each other and contract, forming a solid mass.
• Caramelization – Raw materials that contain a higher degree of sugar can caramelize upon heating, without added sugar.
• Gelatinization – Gelatin is extracted from collagen, the main protein in mammals. It is obtained at high temperatures.
• Maillard-reaction – This chemical reaction occurs between carbohydrates and amino acids at high temperatures. It generates a brown color and an abundance of both taste and fragrances, in toast for example.
• Denaturation – This means “make unnatural” in Latin and implies that the raw material is treated mechanically in a way that gives it new, different properties.
• Emulsion – An emulsion is forcibly mixing two liquids that normally would not blend, such as oil and water.
Read much more about kitchen basics here: Professional Secrets Academy.
