McGee on Food and Cooking: An Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture

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On Food and Cooking pioneered the translation of technical food science into cook-friendly kitchen science and helped give birth to the inventive culinary movement known as "molecular gastronomy." Though other books have now been written about kitchen science, On Food and Cooking remains unmatched in the accuracy, clarity, and thoroughness of its explanations, and the intriguing way in which it blends science with the historical evolution of foods and cooking techniques. I can devote my thousand words on how good this book has been to the culinary world, but most of you already know that. What I will do is to list all the reasons one may wish to read this book.

It's a matter of overcoming fear. Anything that's frozen is not going to go bad. It's probably not going to be very pleasant, so the only way to answer that question is to take them out, try 'em. If you can tolerate them, drown them in a sauce and disguise the fact that they're cardboardy in texture, otherwise toss them." qlacross, about one-fiftieth the size of a fat globule. Around a tenth of the volume of milk is taken up by casein micelles. Much of the calcium in milk is in the micelles, where it acts as a kind of glue holding the protein molecules together. One portion of calcium binds individual protein molecules together into small clusters of 15 to 25. Another portion then helps pull several hundred of the clusters together to form the micelle (which is also held together by the water-avoiding hydrophobic portions of the proteins bonding to each other). Lactose is one-fifth as sweet as table sugar, and only one-tenth as soluble in water (200 vs. 2,000 gm/l), so lactose crystals readily form in such products as condensed milk and ice cream and can give them a sandy texture. McGee's scientific approach to cooking has been embraced and popularized by chefs and authors such as David Chang [23] and J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. [24] Personal life [ edit ]This is the revised and expanded second edition of a book that I first published in 1984, twenty long years ago. In 1984, canola oil and the computer mouse and compact discs were all novelties. So was the idea of inviting cooks to explore the biological and chemical insides of foods. It was a time when a book like this really needed an introduction! In semitropical India, most zebu and buffalo milk was allowed to sour overnight into a yogurt, then churned to yield buttermilk and butter, which when clarified into ghee (p. 37) would keep for months. Some milk was repeatedly boiled to keep it sweet, and then preserved not with salt, but by the combination of sugar and long, dehydrating cooking (see box, p. 26). There are three basic methods for pasteurizing milk. The simplest is batch pasteurization, in which a fixed volume of milk, perhaps a few hundred gallons, is slowly agitated in a heated vat at a minimum of 145°F/62°C for 30 to 35 minutes. Industrial-scale operations use the high-temperature, short-time (HTST) method, in which milk is pumped continuously through a heat exchanger and held at a minimum of 162°F/72°C for 15 seconds. The batch process has a relatively mild effect on flavor, while the HTST method is hot enough to denature around 10% of the whey proteins and generate the strongly aromatic gas hydrogen sulfide (p. 87). Though this "cooked" flavor was considered a defect in the early days, U.S. consumers have come to expect it, and dairies now often intensify it by pasteurizing at well above the minimum temperature; 171°F/77°C is commonly used. Most readers today have at least a vague idea of proteins and fats, molecules and energy, and a vague idea is enough to follow most of the explanations in the first 13 chapters, which cover common foods and ways of preparing them. Chapters 14 and 15 then describe in some detail the molecules and basic chemical processes involved in all cooking; and the Appendix gives a brief refresher course in the basic vocabulary of science. You can refer to these final sections occasionally, to clarify the meaning of pH or protein coagulation as you're reading about cheese or meat or bread, or else read through them on their own to get a general introduction to the science of cooking.

This is a truly epic book. It covers food from every relevant angle: gastronomically, biologically, chemically, historically, culturally. It's exhaustive and, as a result, can be exhausting sometimes. It took a month of fairly regular reading to finish, and I skipped some parts. But if you read this book from cover to cover, you probably should skip some of it, too. It covers so many aspects of nourishment that while you're basically guaranteed to find parts that are interesting or intriguing to you, you're also likely to run into parts that don't grip you that much. So skip the latter and dwell on the former to get the most enjoyment. And it makes for a good reference book, if you ever feel like learning about some given food or cooking process.Perplexity about Calcium and Osteoporosis Our bones are constructed from two primary materials: proteins, which form a kind of scaffolding, and calcium phosphate, which acts as a hard, mineralized, strengthening filler. Bone tissue is constantly being deconstructed and rebuilt throughout our adult lives, so healthy bones require adequate protein and calcium supplies from our diet. Many women in industrialized countries lose so much bone mass after menopause that they're at high risk for serious fractures. Dietary calcium clearly helps prevent this potentially dangerous loss, or osteoporosis. Milk and dairy products are the major source of calcium in dairying countries, and U.S. government panels have recommended that adults consume the equivalent of a quart (liter) of milk daily to prevent osteoporosis.

McGee is a visiting scholar at Harvard University. [4] His book On Food and Cooking has won numerous awards and is used widely in food science courses at many universities. In the animal world, humans are exceptional for consuming milk of any kind after they have started eating solid food. And people who drink milk after infancy are the exception within the human species. The obstacle is the milk sugar lactose, which can't be absorbed and used by the body as is: it must first be broken down into its component sugars by digestive enzymes in the small intestine. The lactose-digesting enzyme, lactase, reaches its maximum levels in the human intestinal lining shortly after birth, and then slowly declines, with a steady minimum level commencing at between two and five years of age and continuing through adulthood.The Milk Factory The mammary gland is an astonishing biological factory, with many different cells and structures working together to create, store, and dispense milk. Some components of milk come directly from the cow's blood and collect in the udder. The principal nutrients, however -- fats, sugar, and proteins -- are assembled by the gland's secretory cells, and then released into the udder. Milk owes its milky opalescence to microscopic fat globules and protein bundles, which are just large enough to deflect light rays as they pass through the liquid. Dissolved salts and milk sugar, vitamins, other proteins, and traces of many other compounds also swim in the water that accounts for the bulk of the fluid. The sugar, fat, and proteins are by far the most important components, and we'll look at them in detail in a moment. Condensed or evaporated milk is made by heating raw milk under reduced pressure (a partial vacuum), so that it boils between 110 and 140°F/43-60°C, until it has lost about half its water. The resulting creamy, mild-flavored liquid is homogenized, then canned and sterilized. The cooking and concentration of lactose and protein cause some browning, and this gives evaporated milk its characteristic tan color and note of caramel. Browning continues slowly during storage, and in old cans can produce a dark, acidic, tired-tasting fluid.