Dr. Rosemarie Zacharias, Frans Peeters, January 2006
At 08:43 PM 2/24/05 +1000, Peter Verhaart wrote:
There is a beautiful book, in German.
Lebensmittelverarbeitung im Haushalt, edited by Dr. Rosmarie Zacharias, published by Verlag Eugen Ulmer Stuttgart 1984. It contains everything on the scientific side of cooking. I was reminded of it when Andrew mentioned heating food to an adequate temperature.
The book contains "Garkurven", logarithmic time scale vertical, linear temperature on the X-axis. One extreme example is red cabbage, taking 500 minutes at 80 C down to 5 minutes at 120 C (pressure cooker)
Another example: Pasta. No hope under 90 C, 18 minutes at 90 C; 12 minutes at 100 C; 6 minutes at 120 C.
Rosmarie does not answer your last question, it involves many physical and chemical changes, it makes some foods digestible, others durable and kills micro organisms.
Best regards, Piet Verhaart
Index:
1. Physical quantities and units
2. Definitions of kitchen processes
3. Concepts and terms from Food Science
4. Reasons for writing recipes
5. Describing and working with quantities
6. Timing of food processes
7. Temperature regimes
8. Food quality
9. Equipment for preparing and preserving food
10. Glossary (English/German; French/German; German/English.French)