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How Chemistry and Physics in the Kitchen
And no, this is not about cooking! But
while we’re on the subject, cooking is not just like chemistry lab because 1)
you have your kitchen and all its equipment and materials to yourself, 2) your
ingredients aren’t dangerous (the story about the guy who tried to wipe up
radioactive iodine after spilling it all over the place and then went to the
student health clinic for help will have to wait another time and is probably
apocryphal anyway), 3) you don’t have to wear goggles and adhere to a strict
dress code, 4) you don’t have to watch something on an apparatus you’ve had to
construct yourself very slowly turn into something mildly interesting over an open
flame, and then have to discard the results in a specially labeled approved
container (or worse yet, have to reverse what you did to it and go back and do
it again a slightly different way), 5) you never have to go through an elaborate
procedure to find out, at the end, what your product actually has in it, 6) you
will never have to count drops (and we’re sometimes talking about dozens of
them!) and 7)
you can eat and drink to your heart’s content throughout the process, especially at the end!
Anyway, your first-hand encounter with hard (and
soft) matter in the kitchen can give you pause for thought: the unhealthier a substance is known to be, the harder it is to clean up.
What you begin to wonder
is whether basic principles of physics, at least where it overlaps with chemistry, plays a big role in what’s
likely to stick to your arteries even if there’s lots of water around. Saturated fat, for instance, is hard to clean up.
If it hasn’t been overcooked, it’s grease, which really resists water by
itself. You can use a sponge or a
scooping device, but
resign yourself to not getting it all if the surface you work with isn’t ideally
smooth because grease can take on any shape and density as those fatty acids
slide smoothly over one another. You have to use soap to have
half a chance here. Alas, the blood
has no natural soap that I know of, and you wouldn't want it in there, either!
Your chances get worse with heavily fried saturated fat, which might consist of much
larger molecules than natural saturated fat does: introduction of high enough heat
into system causes new chemical bonds to form, causing the natural fatty acids to form crosslinks.
When it cools off on, say, the floor (the worst case scenario), it takes
on the consistency of hard plastic and
really sticks. Soaking it
in puddles of water for several minutes can get most of it off, which seems
counterintuitive because water and fat don't mix. But after some soaking, you can see the grease breaking up
into smaller pieces that float on the water. Perhaps the water
(which is denser) pushes its way downwards in a stream because its molecules are drawn together by hydrogen
bonds, the strongest intermolecular bonds. Yet it sometimes takes a fork handle to finish the job.
Don’t count on your arteries having one of them around, although surgeons
can sometimes do the equivalent – until the next fried fat glob lands!
Finely ground starch is another major offender.
Bread flour is generally ground much more finely than is really necessary
or desirable. It’s well known that
starch, when wetted down and left to air dry, makes an excellent glue.
Unfortunately, this effect can also be seen in tofu.
It’s not all starch and is in fact relatively fatty.
But it can still form such a hard mass when left to air dry that it would
probably make a very user-friendly sculpture medium.
Is there any good news? Unsaturated
fat passes the health test with flying colors.
Personal observation suggests to me that raw olive oil probably traverses arteries the
way spongy water-soaked bran traverses the intestines.
Like all liquids, it maintains a constant density but can take any shape.
Just think of all the things it could push along!
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Copyright © 2012-2021 by Dorothy Pugh