Did you cook? Chemically speaking… Part-4
To finalize the ‘Did you cook?’ portion of chemically speaking, I’m dropping 2 dishes that use elements of chemistry in order to achieve flavors and textures.
The first dish will be a burger. The burger will be consisting of buns, patty, sauce, and a few sides like caramelised onions and pickles. When tackling the buns, you need to look for buns which are fluffy and easy to go through. If you are making your own dough for buns, make sure to give time for the dough to rest so that the yeasts within can produce CO2, creating cavernous bubbles, which you can then knead more to evenly distribute the air bubbles hence forming a uniform light bun after baking.
The next few things which need to be prepared a few hours beforehand, preferably a day, are the sauce and the pickles. Create a solution of vinegar, salt, spices and any herbs of your choice. Make sure to boil the solution to increase the rate of diffusion of the spices, and kill any bacteria present which may hinder the fermentation process. Finally add your choice of food to pickle, onions, cucumbers, jalapeños or banana peppers, you have a lot of freedom in that respect. Leave it in the fridge for a minimum of 1 day, though it gets better after every such day till a week, as vinegar and spices within gets absorbed into the food. You can always manually pickle the food by using a brine (salt water solution), letting the bacteria within the foods to produce lactic acid to ferment it, but that carries risks of moulds and other substrates growing, so do it at your own risk.
Now let’s chop the onions into strings, and sauté them in low heat for a minimum of an hour or two for true caramelisation. You should notice it attain a orangish-hue, then reach a brown colours. True caramelization will take an hour at least, and while that occurs, add small increments of water to prevent it from burning from direct contact with the pan every now and then. Simultaneously make your sauce. You can make your own mayo by blending egg yolk with oil, or you can use pre-made mayo with some of the brining liquid spices and other sauces to achieve a similar emulsion. If you want to try a sauce called aioli, try beating egg yolks with butter (preferably in a blender, as its harder with hand) and add lemon juice and vinegar in small quantities. Once you do either sauce, leave them in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours to help sustain and improve flavors.
With all these steps complete, you should have all the ingredients left to make the burger except for the patty. When it comes to making the meaty or filling portion of a meal, it should have an effective ratio of fat to lean ratio. In meats that come in the form of 20% fat and 80% lean, but in vegetarian patties, you can use alternatives for fat like frozen coconut oil or just use fats like canola or peanut to fry the patty, achieving essentially the same. The fat within the patty melts out to fry and caramelize the patty more than direct contact, as fats and oils act as a means of effectively transferring heat on the molecular level, filling every nook and cranny with high heat and giving a crisp and crunchy texture. While making the patty, put a cheese slice atop, preferably one with high amounts of emulsifying salts like regular ‘plastic’ cheese, as they call it. That ‘plastic’ quality is actually essential, as it prevents it from splitting into grease and water when melting, keeping itself from splitting. Finish your burger off by saucing the buns and stacking lettuce, patty, pickles, and onions. Enjoy your burger.
Another dish which uses a stoichiometric approach to its making is ramen. Ramen consists of 5 key elements, Noodle, broth, tare, oil and toppings. The noodle of the ramen is a alakaline product, which means they use basic salts in the dough making. Alkalinity helps build stronger gluten bonds in the dough when kneading, resulting in a more chewy and bouncy product. Of course, the opposite is also true; acidity leads to weaker gluten bonds and hence a more soft dough that disintegrates more easily. The noodles are then cooked as per their thickness to retain some firmness. The next element is broth. The main point of the broth is to source umami compounds from animals bones, kelp, bonito flakes. These ingredients are boiled for long periods of time to break down collagen into gelatine and further into more saturated forms of flavour compounds. While this occurs, water will constantly evaporate, leading to semi-constant attention being needed in keeping the surface level of the water same. As time progresses, the concentration of the broth increases, then its sifted and stored.
The other 2 elements, tare and the aroma oil deliver most of the seasoning. The tare is a salt solution concentrate, and there are many varieties of tare. Miso tare (miso based), shoyu tare (soy-sauce based), and shio tare (salt-based). The tare is used in a 1:10 ratio with the broth, producing adequate seasoning and filling in the flavour profile. The aroma oil in the ramen is made by simmuering ingredients within it, like herbs spices, shrimp shells, chicken skin and many other things. The flavors from these ingredients dissolve within the oil or atleast are suspended within it, so when we drizzle it atop the bowl it floats and gets picked up when we slurp the noodles. This aids the flavour sensory process, as our olfactory receptor’s and taste receptors work together to enchance the experience of flavors. As we slurp, we aerate the food, and this, to an extent, improves the taste as it hits both senses harder.
The final element of the ramen is toppings. You can use crisped-up meats, pickled ginger, scallions, and other sources of umami like dried mushrooms, which were boiled into the stock. The thing about dried mushrooms is the drying process actually forms new and more concentrated forms of umami compounds, so when we boil them back up, we release those compounds into our dish, increasing the umami qualities.
This dish uses a lot of prep-work and incentive labour to complete. You have to brine your ingredients a couple days before making the dough, and boiling the broth over the day while making sure the products arent burning at the bottom. Having to level the broth and tare to make sure the volume remains constant while increasing the concentration, all these actions employ great levels of insight and measurement, but at the end is the most rewarding. So is using more chemical understanding to our food make it taste better? Or is experience all that is needed? I say why not create a theory using chemistry, and employ it into our dishes and see if it comes out right, we take our learnings and carry forward so that we may keep improving in that respect.
Thank you for reading! If you found this article helpful, please consider sharing it with your network and clapping for it on Medium. Your support means a lot and helps me to create more valuable content.
Continue Your Journey
- Previous Article:[Did you cook? Chemically speaking… Part-3]
- Next Article: []
For more insightful articles on this topic, follow my publication: Chemically Speaking…
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to leave them below or reach out to me at @akshayshankar 2007. I love hearing from my readers and engaging in meaningful discussions.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com. * This is the original work of Akshay Shankar. Follow here www.linkedin.com/in/akshayshankar2007
