The Kitchen and the Lab

To this point, my focus has been largely on the transformations and processes that convert raw materials and ingredients into packaged final food products, while considering the relationships between such a scale and what happens in the kitchen. I believe that food science is food science whether it happens on a 10-tonne scale in a factory or in a kitchen at home or in a restaurant. It is just a matter of scale. But is this really a defensible proposition? As pointed out several times already, all food products consist of a set of raw materials and ingredients, which we submit to a process or series of processes and then place in a package in which it should remain safe and suitable for consumption for a defined period of time. What about a meal? Ingredients and raw materials, check, just taken from a larder, fridge, or freezer. Processes? Check, just maybe a different set and scale, as will be discussed. Package and storage? No, but one could say the plate, room, atmosphere, and a million other elements of presentation of a dish at home or in a restaurant are the package. Likewise, being able to maintain a shelf life may not be a priority, but it is usually regarded as a good thing when safety for the eater is guaranteed, while we often hope that those leftovers we put in the fridge or bring home in our doggy bags will retain some form of safe edibility for at least a while. Food science is science above all else, whatever scale it happens on. In the kitchen, our raw materials, animal or vegetable in particular, are products of biology, while the reactions that take place on plate or during cooking (or other processing steps) are driven by chemistry, and physics determines what happens when we heat, cool, mix, or all the other things we do. Like I said in the Introduction to this book, even the humblest kitchen is a highly scientific environment, and every meal is an experiment.