Cooking is chemistry, I always say to my disbelieving and sometimes mocking children.
Till now I had always been left hanging in the breeze amid the eye-rolling and teenage disdain, but 32-year-old computer scientist, artist and cooking geek Jeff Potter has finally provided me with some backup. His book Cooking for Geeks is chock full of explanations for the controlled chemical reactions that constitute cooking with heat, plus explanations and diagrams that illustrate how proteins denature as a function of heat and time, information you will need if you are to explain to astonished guests why medium rare is the most popular outcome for steak.
“Cooking is definitely chemistry, and physics and biology and a whole bunch of other scientific domains. It’s also a lot of fun,” Potter said. “I think it really appeals to young people who didn’t necessarily grow up with parents that showed them how to cook or who are just curious.”
Cooking for Geeks has struck a chord in a society that has come to adore geeks and nerds of all kinds. The book is in its fourth printing barely 2½ months after its release, and it has drawn rave reviews from The Atlantic and The New Yorker, among others.
“It’s a blend of high school chemistry textbook and cookbook,” Potter said. “My dad taught me very early in my life how to make things like pancakes, and I went through life knowing how to cook stuff, but I never understood why we do certain things.”
The book is sure to satisfy the curious cook, specifically people who hate being told what to do without knowing why they are doing it.
“A lot of people are frustrated by cookbooks that are just sets of instructions,” Potter explained. “They tell you what to do but not why it works.
“When you know the science behind certain processes, you form good models in your mind, so that when you go into the kitchen and you change something in a recipe, you have a pretty good idea about how it is going to turn out.
“If you really understand that baking is about hydration, gluten formation and the temperatures required for starches to gelatinize and for the surface to brown, you can essentially bake bread without a recipe,” Potter said. “Baking is about error tolerances. It you put 50 per cent too much onion in a fajita, it still tastes good, but if you put 50 per cent too much water in a bread dough, you don’t have bread.”
Potter follows in the footsteps of TV cooking geek Alton Brown, who has made a career of taking an encyclopedic knowledge of cooking and distilling it into 22-minute science lessons complete with recipes on the very popular Good Eats. Potter is Alton Brown on steroids, employing a depth of scientific explanation that exploits one of the benefits of the print medium. In what may be a harbinger of his future on the small screen, Potter dons his goggles to make ice cream in 30 seconds using liquid nitrogen in a campy video on his website (cookingforgeeks.com). Check it out.