Have you ever made a sauce to go with a steak that separates the moment you add butter to it? Only to realise the recipe wasn’t lying when they said to stir the sauce over low heat! So now you’re left with a broken sauce and a boring steak. 

Or why a no-bake cheesecake recipe might call for room temperature cream cheese instead of cold cream cheese? 

Well, it’s all part of food science. Understanding the basics of food science (flavour, temperature etc.) is essential in improving our cooking techniques, resulting in more confidence to innovate recipes and better dishes. 

A fundamental basis of food science is understanding how ingredients work. For instance, when making mango sticky rice, you wouldn’t want to substitute glutinous sticky rice with sushi rice because despite their similarities, their chemical make-up differs, resulting in a different taste and texture (and no, you can’t just reduce it to both grains being sticky). 

And by learning flavour compounds, you can enhance dishes with flavour developments utilising balances. You don’t just add salt to make food salty (think of salted caramel) but to cut back against the bitterness and enhance the sweetness of it, which makes salted caramel work so well. 

Or do you have a dish that’s lacking something in flavour, but you can’t put your finger on it, despite it already being balanced? Umami is the key component that’s missing to give it the extra depth it needs. Egg fried rice is one of those dishes that needs a bit of umami to give it the signature egg fried rice taste, coming from the soy sauce. 

Learning the basics of food science allows you to deeply appreciate the arts of cooking and refine your techniques. Next time, add some mushroom bouillon to a dish for added depth. 

Image credit: Photo by Tucker Good on Unsplash