Did you know that flour is a hydrocolloid? Flour is a fairly common cooking ingredient, but obscure ingredients once found on the lower reaches of processed foods labels are now finding their way into high cuisine, enabling dishes like pretzel shaped foie gras. Chefs are using science to better understand their cooking, and to create new ways of cooking.

This trend melds two areas that seem as if they should be closely intertwined, but have in fact been almost separate: culinary arts and food science. Food science arose as a way to preserve the shelf life of processed foods.

In the New York Times article, Food 2.0: Chefs as Chemists, food science writer Harold McGee notes that ten years ago “no serious restaurant would be caught dead using these ingredients … Because they were industrial stabilizers for the most part.” But then chefs began to ask what these ingredients do, and how they could be used in cooking, which is, after all, applied chemistry, and a hydrocolloid best known for growing bacteria in petri dishes can also be combined with another material to build a transparent sheet which can be used to cover hot food.

Check out the links below and use the power of science and technology to help make your Thanksgiving meal extra tasty. Or simply impress your friends and family at the dinner table with your knowledge of the science of Turkey Day.

• Turkey Day Chemistry in the Kitchen
• Thanksgiving Meals: Cooking with Chemistry
  
• Thanksgiving Cooking for Engineers
• Turkey Lovers Gobble up Tech