The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

It was an observation that anyone who’s ever cooked a
steak could have made, and one that has since led
restaurants to completely revise their cooking methods.
Indeed, many high-end restaurants these days cook their
steaks first, sealed in plastic, in low-temperature water baths,
searing them only at the end in order to add flavor. The
result is steaks that are juicier, moister, and more tender than
anything the world was eating before von Liebig’s
erroneous assertion was finally disproved.
The question is, if debunking von Liebig’s theory was
such a simple task, why did it take nearly a hundred and
fifty years to do it? The answer lies in the fact that cooking
has always been considered a craft, not a science.
Restaurant cooks act as apprentices, learning, but not
questioning, their chefs’ techniques. Home cooks follow the
notes and recipes of their mothers and grandmothers or
cookbooks—perhaps tweaking them here and there to suit
modern tastes, but never challenging the fundamentals.
It’s only in recent times that cooks have finally begun to
break out of this shell. Restaurants that revel in using the
science of cookery to come up with new techniques that
result in pleasing and often surprising outcomes are not just
proliferating but are consistently ranked as the best in the
world (Chicago’s Alinea or Spain’s now-closed El Bulli, for
example). It’s an indication that as a population, we’re
finally beginning to see cooking for what it truly is: a
scientific engineering problem in which the inputs are raw
ingredients and technique and the outputs are deliciously
edible results.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not out to try and prove to