A New View of Food and Cooking [Slide Show]
Take visual tour through the scientific phenomena at work in the kitchen—and explore the new world of high-tech, science-inspired cuisine
![A New View of Food and Cooking [Slide Show]](https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/FA203654-C93B-4F07-B92FE0899E817DEE.jpg?w=590&h=393)
A New View of Food and Cooking [Slide Show]
- EDIBLE FOAM RULES Edible foams, like the vacuum-inflated chocolate shown here, follow the same simple geometrical rules that all foams do. Among those rules: the intersection of bubbles always joins exactly three films and each pair of films always stabilizes at an angle of exactly 120 degrees... Ryan Matthew Smith, Modernist Cuisine, LLC
- INSIDE YOUR GRILL Hamburgers cooked over a bed of coals are irradiated to perfection by infrared waves. Grills cook foods mainly through radiant heat, so the sweet spot of the grill—where food cooks evenly—is affected by the height of the grill above the coals... Ryan Matthew Smith, Modernist Cuisine, LLC
- STEAMING CROSS-SECTION When steam condenses back into liquid water, it deposits an enormous amount of energy—the so-called latent heat of vaporization—on the surface supporting the water. We thus expected steaming to almost always be faster than boiling at cooking vegetables... Ryan Matthew Smith, Modernist Cuisine, LLC
- COOL TRICK Next time you throw a party, try this fun trick with supercooled water. Place a clean bottle of pure water in the freezer for a couple hours until it is very cold but not yet frozen. Then gently pour it from a height into your guests' glasses and watch the water freeze on contact... Ryan Matthew Smith, Modernist Cuisine, LLC
- WATER BALANCE Fresh foods are mostly water—so to understand cooking, you must appreciate the unusual chemistry and physics of water in all its forms. These graduated cylinders show the percentages of the mass of various foods that comprise water (clear liquid) and fats (yellow liquid)... Ryan Matthew Smith, Modernist Cuisine, LLC
