Aren’t we just supplying heat to the food? What causes the drastic difference in taste?
In: Chemistry
Different factors play a role here. What happens to food if you apply heat? I’ll name a few things:
Fat melts, becomes liquid or creamy. Makes the texture nice and pleasant.
Sugars caramelize.
Starch granules pop and gelatinize, therefore become smooth and soft, have a better mouthfeel.
Proteins (with some sugars) go through the maillard reaction which is still not understood in its entirety. It’s the reaction which causes the browning of meat, for example.
(Unpleasant-ish) textures change. Eggs and doughs solidify – meat and hard vegetables become softer and nicer to eat and chew.
Some toxins are denatured (e. g. beans and some mushrooms need to be cooked to be edible).
And of course one point could also be that we’ve grown to prefer the taste of cooked food during our evolution, as some of these processes make foods more digestible and therefore provide an evolutionary advantage.
Depends on the food. Cucumbers taste better raw. We also generally add more (herbs, spices, salt, other foods) to cooked foods. Raw foods are usually on their own.
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High heat supplies the activation energy for a number of chemical reactions that transform the compounds in the food. One of the most important is the [Maillard reaction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maillard_reaction), which denatures the proteins in cooked food and causes many changes in color and taste. This is why so many recipes say something like “cook at 350 °F” – lower temperatures aren’t hot enough to activate this process (or will only do so very slowly), while a higher temperature will quickly burn whatever you’re trying to cook.
Well timmy, there are a lot of answers to your question!
First think of raw eggs… kinda like snot right? Thats because its natural protein! That protein is really nice to add to all sorts of food because its good for you and it hold food together. But before its yummy it needs to be made into cooked egg. Cooking an egg takes that protein which is like long strands of molecules and curls it right up, kinda like when granpa lit his beard on fire when he fell asleep with his pipe. remember how his beard got all curly?
Another reason to cook food is to make it safe because some invisible bugs called microbes live in raw food. Dont be scared its perfectly normal but its why we need to keep wet food in the refrigerator and why we need to cook it!
Do you like steak? I do too but do you like grandma’s pepper steak? me neither. Do you know what the difference is? Yes! its the barbecue! Getting those grill marks make thing taste good, just like when we have browning on the pizza cheese, they call it the maillard reaction and it happens with protein and sugar and fat in food when enough heat is added.
Cakes, pastries, bread, gravies are all made with starch, starch is anoter type of long molecule but it needs to be cooked with water to become snotty, kind of the opposite of proteins, cool right. So adding heat to a dough which is a mix of starches and proteins will make starch snotty and protein solid so it will become soft and full of moisture.
Basically what you call cooking is a bunch of different things using heat to modify food so that it becomes much more awesome than just eating raw eggs.
When you eat food your body breaks it down into tiny little bits which it can then transport to different places. Your body can then use all the nice things inside the food (vitamins and nutrients) to make energy and keep you healthy.
The reason cooked food tastes better is simply because some of the work to break down the food has already been done for you! The brain rewards you for doing things which help you survive and eating is a pretty important part of that. These cooked foods are safer and the energy is more readily available so your brain notices this and makes you feel pretty excited when you eat it.
There are a number of chemical reactions that occur during cooking. Just like applying heat to many other things actually changes their physical state (like paper or water) the chemicals in the food change as well. This change also produces a change in the texture and “flavor” of the chemicals within the food, sometimes to the point of being edible when before they were inedible or even poisonous to humans before.
The Maillard ‘reaction’ is actually a whole series of chemical reactions that are crucial to creating the characteristic flavours and brown colour of roasted coffee and many other foods – including chocolate, toast, and grilled steak. The reactions are named after Louis Camille Maillard, a French doctor who first described them in 1910.
Reducing Sugars and Amino Acids.
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