Paper Palate

Take your seats!  It’s the third installment of Paper Palate’s cooking school.  Please open your textbook (and the Culinary Institute of America’s), The Professional Chef, to chapter 3.  Last time, we looked at menus and recipes and their effect on pricing.  Today, we are going to look at food nutrition and food science.

According to the text, nutrition is the “study of diet and health.”  The Professional Chef rightly points out that eaters are no longer just worried about how their food tastes and looks, but also eating complete, healthy meals full of whole gains, nutrient-dense foods, and even meals without certain things like soy, dairy, and meat.

The Professional Chef does a great job of listing the major vitamins and minerals that the body needs to survive, as well as explaining what the USDA recommends for American diets in terms of the percentage of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats.  It then goes into what makes proteins complete vs. incomplete and how to pair foods to create complete vegetarian proteins.  This section was very interesting and I am embarrassed to say that it was not until I read it that I found out tofu is not a complete protein.  It needs to be paired with rice to provide a full complement of amino acids.

The Professional Chef also makes the point that because diners want to eat healthy, it is up to the chef to figure out which combination of dishes a customer is likely order.  Using this knowledge, the chef can ensure each customer gets the maximum amount of vitamins, minerals, proteins, and complex carbs.

After nutrition, The Professional Chef provides a primer about food science.  Food science, the study of the reactions that occur when cooking, is a huge topic and a class all on its own.  In order to keep the topic manageable, this chapter talks mainly about heat and the ways it can cook food (conduction, convection, and radition), how proteins denature and why that leads to clumping, and caramelization.
Caramelization, in particular, received a good amount of attention because of its importance to the development of flavors in sweet and savory cooking.  Caramelization is when the sugars found in meats, vegetables and other foods starts to melt and darken.  The darker the sugars, the deeper and more rich the flavor.  In order to illustrate the importance of this one culinary concept, The Professional Chef lists coffee and chocolate as two things which taste better because of caramelization.  Quite important indeed!

This chapter was fairly short, but finally the book is moving away from some of the more business-oriented aspects of being a chef.  Granted, Chapter 3 was still very high level, but I could almost feel myself getting my knives out and getting ready to cook.

Maybe next time!