Ever wondered why/how a banana browns, how a piece of meat gets those classic grill marks, why a broccoli is green (and can turn yellow or mushy green), why an orange is orange or how yeast ferments? All of those are questions that can be answered using food chemistry.
Food chemistry studies and analyzes molecules and their transformations/reactions in food.
However, before you can start doing these more complex analyses on your food, it’s useful to have your basics sorted. The articles you will find here do just that.
Fruits and vegetables have a great wide variety of colours. The spectrum goes from orange to purple to green to bright red. It’s amazing how nature has developed all these bright and beautiful colours. In most cases these colours originate from a group of molecules inside the plant. The unique …
In the Netherlands we have this one cookie type that’s used for a lot of different dishes. They’re popular for use in cookie pie crusts, ice cream and a bunch of other recipes. Their name: Bastognekoeken, which apparently refers to a town in Belgium that their maker thought of when …
Whenever making caramel, marshmallows, honeycomb or just about any other sugar candy you’ll often find that recipe either tells you to boil a sugar syrup to a certain temperature. Or, they’ll tell you to cook it to a certain stage, for instance, soft ball or a hard crack stage. The first …
Once you’ve peeled your banana, you’d better eat it. If you forget about it and return a few hours later it will have turned an unappetizing brown. Same goes for leaving an unpeeled banana on your counter top for a few days. It might have been bright yellow when you …
There are a lot of different chemical reactions within food, far too many to all mention on this blog. However, chemical reactions can be organized in different types of reactions. One your understand the general mechanism of such a type of reaction, you’ll be able to understand most reactions of …
Ever tried to make a simple dressing of olive oil and balsamic vinegar? Noticed that it’s impossible to keep these two mixed without continuously stirring or adding something like mustard? Wondered how food manufacturers are able to do this? If you’ve looked on labels of various dressings and sauces you …
Sometimes a term might be so familiar to you that you use it all the time, whereas another person, who doesn’t know that term, has no idea what you’re talking about. When talking about science that can be quite a common problem. And even though we try to keep the …
Imagine having the pages of a book, but having no clue in which order they should go. Or having a recipe with only an ingredient list, no instructions on how to make the food. Or having an IKEA cupboard, with all the individual pieces, but no manual. All of this …
After writing about making your own extracts (vanilla & orange/lemon) and how to use these it is time we start talking more hard core science. What is extraction from a chemists perspective? And is there something we can calculate here? Making you interested in food science is one of the …
Why does red cabbage turn blue, purple or pink in different liquids? Why does a steak turn brown when heated? Why can an oven bake muffins? Why does a higher temperature oven burn your carrots more easily? All of this can be explained with chemical reactions. Chemical reactions are at …
