I remember watching a Vsauce video or something like that said that you can unscramble proteins in a cooked egg to theoretically uncook it. I was wondering whether you can also do it with for example a steak or maybe some starch.
In: Chemistry
Long and short answers. Yes for a select few things, no for most.
Anything cooked with high heat or fire is fundamentally changed at a chemical level. Same reason you cant put a piece of paper back together after it’s caught on fire.
There are some fringe loopholes, like cooked gelatin that can be freeze dried back into an granulated form, but cooking is almost always going to mean a chemical change that can’t be reversed.
If you ground up a steak and fed it to a cow (which would be very unnatural and feels wrong but bear with me), the cow will use the amino acids in the steak to make new proteins and grow new muscles.
This is true of all foods, since all foods are ultimately “just” complicated arrangements of molecules, and biological organisms are great at rearranging molecules into things that they can use (in fact that’s how we get food in the first place, because plants rearrange things like water, CO2 and minerals into carbs, fats, proteins, etc.). So in this sense, all foods can be broken down into their building blocks and then built back up.
In principle, there is no reason why this process should require the intercedence of an animal or other biological organism. We should also be able to achieve the same chemical reactions through sufficiently advanced technology.
The question I guess is whether this qualifies as “uncooking” something. This all depends on your definition of that term: how many steps you allow, how advanced the required technology is allowed to be, etc. Certainly it’s hard to imagine uncooking almost any food in a household setting, unless you allow really simple things like “uncooking” ice back to liquid water, or “uncooking” salt water back to fresh water and salt crystals (which you can do by boiling the salt water to leave the salt behind, and condensing the steam against a cold surface).
If using specific enzymes to re-attach molecules that got broken up by cooking counts… some things could be uncooked i guess
Cooking does a variety of things. For proteins, it denatures them, which means they lose their 3d shape but keep the order and attachment of their molecules. When this is the only thing that happens, it is technically possible to un-denature them, but to do so is incredibly challenging.
Proteins take a 3d shape because different sections of the long chain are attracted to one another. This causes layers of folds, helices, and bridges that can ultimately form almost any shape with enough amino acids. Molecules aren’t picky about which specific molecule they bind to though, so if there are 10 bridges in a molecule, and they break apart, any of those 20 bride halves would be happy to stick to any of the others.
You can imagine denaturing and un-denaturing a protein to be like if you took a giant sculpture made of a single strand of double sided tape, unraveled it back into tape form, and then tried to sculpt it again using nothing but a backhoe. Not a perfect analogy, but you get the idea.
Sometimes cooking does more than denaturing proteins, instead breaking or forming new bonds. This happens all the time: caramelization, charring, etc are all chemical reactions. These can be reversed, but doing so is way harder than causing them.
The bottom lines here are entropy the conservation of matter. If nothing escapes from your food while you cook it (smoke, steam, splattering, char left on the grill) then everything you started with will still be there, just in different forms. It is therefore possible to turn it into what you started if the technique to do so exists. Is there any single uncooking process analogous to cooking though? Almost certainly not. Cooking causes disorder, and uncooked food (and life in general) has an incredible amount of order.
To briefly explain order, things tend towards chaos because there are more ways something can be chaotic than ordered. If I build a sandcastle on the beach, theres only one way for it to be that sandcastle, but a ton of ways for it to be sand. The universe favors all of these possible states equally, so a disordered one is far more likely.
Why does my sandcastle apply to your egg? Because while you can stomp on my sandcastle all you like, you would be hard pressed to give the sand one swift kick and have it land in sand castle formation. Cooking food is like kicking my sandcastle. All the sand is there, and it could become my sandcastle again, but not if all I know how to do is kick.
Scientists have learned to unboil an egg.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2015/jan/27/scientists-found-way-to-unboil-egg-proteins-cancer-research
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