Yes, I've been watching a bunch of food science videos - mostly from Adam Ragusea - recently.
Food science is fascinating. In fact, it was my second choice for a new high-interest, low-homework science class back when Princeton was making a set of new, at-the-time-semester-long science classes about twenty years ago. First choice was material science because I'd just taken the first year workshop from ASM and was geeked about how cool it was.
By the way, they have student camps, too.
Last week I posted a video from Adam Ragusea showing that garlic and egg yolks both contain compounds that can emulsify sauces. Linked from that video via YouTube was this video who contains a little more background on emulsions in the kitchen.
That's a whole lot of garlic there, Adam.
My wife is firmly opposed to mayonnaise in just about any form or dish, so that stuff only crosses our threshold when I buy it - usually in a premade potato salad from Jungle Jim's.
But I'm fascinated by the emulsifying abilities of both egg yolk and garlic, and Adam does a great job of explaining the inherent science in both in this video.
I demonstrate something like this in my classroom using Flinn's ice melting blocks and a knock-off MiracleThaw from a second-hand store.
As one of the comments for the above video notes, "Thermodynamics is often very counter-intuitive."
See, it's funny because Adam's talking about counter materials in the kitchen.
I'll wait while you laugh.
Remember, vinegar leg on the right.
Big fan of Adam Ragusea here.
He does a great job balancing useful cooking information, science, and his perspective on the sometimes overreaction to and misunderstanding of that science. He's also really good at integrating the sponsor ads smoothly.
In this video, Adam goes through what's in liquid smoke, how you can make it at home, and how you can use it in food.
I'll warn you that this is a much more complex look at the side products of incomplete combustion, something we barely touch upon in our high school chemistry courses at Princeton. I do mention that it's officially complete combustion that produces just carbon dioxide and water vapor but that incomplete combustion can produce other products like carbon and carbon monoxide.
This video was published by Adam Ragusea in November 2024 about a study from a month or so earlier than that.
The tl;dr of the study is that many black plastics are produced from recycled black plastics that are frequently sourced from electronic waste which contains higher amounts of particularly toxic, flame-retardant chemicals. Those 'new' black plastic items could - especially if used in high heat areas like food flippers and turners on the stovetop - release higher than safe amounts of those chemicals.
In the above video, Adam goes through the possible concerns that this raises as well as noting a possible math error in the study's calculations suggesting that the level of concern is slightly lower than the authors might have initially suggested.
The article was corrected - noting exactly the math error that Adam suggested, and Adam published a spectacular video explaining why that error should not undermine faith in the scientific process or even in the researchers and authors of the original article.
A few years back - when we were still in the previous iteration of Princeton High School - I had my AP chemistry students make cupcakes with three separate leavening methods: baking soda, baking powder & soda, and mechanical leavening (whipping egg whites). The three methods are fascinatingly different and produce very different results.
In this video Adam and his baker friend look at the differences between box cake mix and from-scratch cakes. They're not quite looking at just the leavenings, but the science behind the differences are fascinating.
I'm sometimes sad that we went with material science rather than food science as one of our science electives at Princeton. I wish I had a good curriculum for high school students to explore food science, but that would also require a cooking classroom - something that our principal at the time of the building of new Princeton High School wasn't interested in building anything that practical.
Heat =/= temperature
Temperature is the average kinetic energy of the particles in a substance.
Heat is energy transferred from one body to another due to a difference in temperature.
Hot things - like boiling water or simmering sauce - conduct energy to cool things - like your finger.
The amount of energy you get from that hot sauce depends on way more than the temperature of the sauce. More mass of sauce that you get on your finger means more molecules with that same average kinetic energy, so more total energy, so more pain.
In this video Adam switches mass out for time in contact with the sauce, but in this case that seems a fair swap.
Don't dunk your finger in hot fryer oil or hot sugar syrup. According to Adam, go ahead and dunk (or flick) your finger in hot, water- or oil-based sauces.
As always, vinegar leg on the right.
"It's Dutching time!"
Thanks, Adam.
Turns out there's some serious chemistry happening in the kitchen when you're making - and especially when you're dutching - some chocolate from scratch.
Well, dangit.
I've been saying that the heat-killing ability of milk toward chili peppers was because the capsaicin is soluble in fat which means that full-fat milk should be way more effective at reducing the burn.
But the study cited in this video says that skim milk was slightly more effective than was full-fat milk.
Dangit, how dare they learn something that makes a good story I've been telling for a couple of decades not be true anymore...
I promise that I'll have something fun and dopey for next week. We've been on a run of pretty heavy content mostly telling us that polymers are killing us.
I'm going to go outside and watch some butterflies.
I can vouch for that Harold McGee book referenced toward the beginning. I have it on the shelf in my living room - though I'll admit that I've barely read more than a third of it. There's a LOT of science happening in there, and it's a dense read.
Adam explains the basics of heat conductivity, reactivity (leaching ions to make whipping egg whites easier), reactivity again (to pull sulfur out of the vapor distillate in alcohol distillation), malleability (peening the copper bowl), ductility (making copper whisks), reactivity another time (such as the health hazards of drinking acidic cocktails like mules from copper cups), and conductivity again (useful for making jams and candy).
And then he throws down the possibility of testing a pure silver pan...I want him to buy one, but I'm not going to support him to make that easier for him to do.
Some explanations are so remarkably simply that I never would've thought of them.
I've heard of hopper crystals in bismuth for years. I always assumed that they were studied by a scientist named Hopper. In this video, Adam Ragusea explains that they're actually called hopper crystals (not Hopper crystals) because they resemble the shape of a hopper that feeds ingredients into a production line.
And that's just the surface level of new knowledge that I got from this video. Adam spends much more time trying to explain why making hopper crystals of salt - the ones he shows and that I have in my cabinets at home as Maldon salt - is hard to do. Apparently they only form in super-saturated salt solutions and then only stay hopper-shaped pyramids until they either bump into other crystals to form a raft or get heavy enough to sink to the bottom of the solution and in-fill with more salt.
If only they could get them to grow in space - as an International Space Station experiment shown in the video recounts...
Vinegar leg on the right, folks.
Took me a while to figure out what the heck that was about, but I've been watching Adam Ragusea for a while now. His videos are a nice balance of cooking technique and science. Plus I like his style - at least in these shorter videos. (Admittedly his filmed podcasts drive me a little bonkers - as is the case with most hour-long podcasts that seem like fifteen minutes of content stretched and rambled out to a full hour.)
I'm fairly well convinced that my next stovetop needs to be induction, not gas.
During my senior year at Wabash College I wrote a column for our student newspaper, The Bachelor. In one of the columns, I put forth my thoughts about the damage we were doing to the environment. I can sum my thoughts up then as 'in the short run, we're clearly destroying our environment...in the long enough run, the planet won't even remember we were here.'
Amazingly, my thoughts on that haven't much changed in the two and a half decades since I wrote that column, though my thoughts as to how we're poisoning our environment have been informed by a bit more learning about science since then. I'm pretty sure it's the polymers that will be our undoing. We're making remarkably stable molecules that are inherently hostile to all living things at the moment - at least until something evolves to consume them, which will hopefully happen eventually - and we're doing so in remarkable volume.
If there's one thing we need to do to save the life on our planet, it's to stop mucking about with polymers. Stop making them. Stop burning them. Stop refining them.
