On Food and Cooking

after thickening. A satisfying sauce offers stimulation to most of our chemical senses. A sauce that doesn’t ...

So it’s good to understand the physical structures of common sauces, how they’re put together and how they’re rui ...

watery, more substantial. The way this is done is to add some nonwatery substance — a dispersed pha ...

water molecules can move only a small distance before they collide with one of these foreign, les ...

divide the liquid into many small, local masses: and by dividing, they organize and collect it and give it ...

Cloudy Suspensions: Thickening with Particles Most of our raw ingredients — vegetables, fruits, herbs, ...

size of its particles. The smaller the particles, the less noticeable they are to the tongue, and the smoother t ...

and fats. Thickening a liquid with food particles. In a suspension, microscopic chunks of plant or animal ...

are so much smaller and lighter than intact starch granules and cell fragments, they don’t settle out and sep ...

Solid Dispersions: Jellies When the water phase of a food fluid has enough thickening molecules ...

Thickening a liquid with long food molecules. Dissolved molecules of plant starch or animal gelatin get ...

two incompatible liquids, with droplets of one liquid dispersed in a continuous phase of the other, is ...

emulsion. Cream is an especially robust and versatile base for emulsified sauces. Foams: Thickening with Bubb ...

The cook can thicken the fluid with truly substantial particles or molecules (oil droplets, egg ...

simple suspensions, molecular dispersions, emulsions, or foams. They’re usually a combination of two or ...

flavors the sauce has. Thickening agents also actively reduce the effectiveness of the flavor molecules in the ...

has its uses. Many sauces can be thickened not just by adding thickeners, but by removing some of the continuo ...

another sensation (viscosity) for the brain to attend to. Then this reduced saltiness reduces the apparent arom ...

other to form brown pigments and a host of new flavor molecules (p. 778). But if the juices remain juice ...

proteins that the cook works with. Nearly all food proteins respond to the heat of cooking by unfoldin ...