On Food and Cooking

special sense designed specifically to detect them. Sugars taste sweet, and sweetness is a nearly universal ...

not digested and pass intact into the colon, where various bacteria do digest them, producing large quantit ...

Polysaccharides, which include starch and cellulose, are sugar polymers, or molecules composed of nume ...

store their supply of sugar. Starch is simply a chain of glucose sugars. Plants produce starch in two different ...

and so of meats, although its concentration at the time of slaughter will affect the ultimate pH of the meat ...

granules but leaves cellulose fibers intact; most animals can digest starch, but not cellulose. Cellulose is a ...

cellulose, they are partly soluble in water, and therefore contribute to the softening of cooked vegetables and f ...

consistencies in frozen goods and candies. Like the cell-wall cements, they’re generally complex polymers ...

Of all the major food molecules, proteins are the most challenging and mercurial. The others, water and fats ...

Amino Acids and Peptides Like starch and cellulose, proteins are large polymers of smaller molecular units. T ...

that generate flavor at high cooking temperatures (p. 778). Second, many single amino acids and ...

Amino Acids Influence Protein Behavior The third important characteristic of amino acids is that they ...

Protein Structure Proteins are formed by linking the amine nitrogen of one amino acid with a carbon atom o ...

bend back on itself and bring together amino acids that are some distance along the chain from each ...

Amino acids and proteins, denaturation and coagulation. Top: Three of the 20-odd amino acids important ...

Heating and other cooking processes can break the fold-stabilizing bonds and cause the long chains to ...

between molecules, and on whether water can separate the molecules from each other by hydrogen bonding. T ...

molecule’s folded shape. (The strong backbone bonds are broken only in extreme conditions or with the help ...

Protein Coagulation There are several general consequences of denaturation that follow for most food ...

tightly, densely, and irreversibly. And as they do so, they squeeze the pockets of water out from between ...