Cooking - the ChemE way

As I have told you before, I was learning to cook from my mother these days. Today, I went a little further ahead in my education and cooked dinner independently, i.e., without any help from my guru. It was a simple affair – rice and some cabbage; the end effect was witnessed by my sister, mother and me. From the perspective of a first time cook, I would say it exceeded expectation (EE).

The utensils remain to be scrubbed but as I had to tell you folks this little exuberant news, I excused myself of the duty and let mother handle it (after all, I had apprenticed to become a cook and not a dish-washer :).

As is the case with any initial venture, I made a few mistakes and I learned quite a lot about the nitty-gritty of cooking. The engineer in me could not help but make a few observations that popped up in my head during the enterprise.

Cooking is an art. However, I think it will bloom fantastically if the rigours of engineering laws are applied to it. For instance, a knowledge of chemistry behind the addition of various ingredients should be drawn up. It is really frustrating when you have to rely on someone else’s recipe which are, most of the time, a result of the primitive approach of trial and error method. How can you be sure an X amount of this substance and Y amount of that substance will give the most optimum result? I apologize, Sir, I cannot take your word for this when I know that your conclusion is the outcome of a very poor and inefficient scientific endeavour, namely, the trial and error method.

Also, if I want to substitute one ingredient with the other when the former is unavailable, how will I calculate the deviation of my new dish from the original? What about substitution brought about by necessities like allergies(such as peanut allergy), diseases like diabetes, etc.?

The molecular level of chemistry might be too mind-boggling for non-chemists and at the reaction level, it might be too humungous. If that is the case, some simpler empirical relations can be developed to guide the composition of everyday dishes.

Notwithstanding, we must refrain from creating equations that are computationally extensive to solve, as resources of the homemaker are somewhat limited. A more prudent solution would be to develop pictorial graphs on the lines of Mollier diagram and Moody’s chart.

I believe that it is only a matter of time before somebody achieves the points I have elucidated above. Only then will the homemaker be worthy of the name –‘the domestic engineer’.