Aren’t we just supplying heat to the food? What causes the drastic difference in taste?
In: Chemistry
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.
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