What Is Cooking? The Science Behind Food Transformation - Section 2: What Is Cooking, Really?

When most people think of cooking, they picture applying heat to food. While heat is certainly important, cooking encompasses much more. At its core, cooking is any process that transforms raw ingredients.

Good cooking makes food more digestible and nutritious by making nutrients more accessible. It makes food safer to eat, more flavorful, and more appealing in texture. These aren't separate goals but interconnected aspects of the same transformative process.

Cooking achieves these transformations through physical and chemical changes to food. At a molecular level, cooking alters protein structures, breaks down cell walls, converts complex compounds into simpler ones, and creates new flavor molecules.

We accomplish these sophisticated molecular changes with basic tools and techniques refined over thousands of years across human cultures. The magic of cooking lies in this intersection of simple methods and complex transformations.

Recognizing Food Transformation#

Think about a raw potato versus a baked one. The raw potato is hard, starchy, and not particularly appetizing. The baked potato is soft, fluffy, and delicious. What changed? The cooking process broke down the rigid cell structures, converted complex starches to simpler ones, and made the nutrients more accessible to your digestive system.

Or consider raw eggs versus scrambled eggs. The clear, slimy egg white becomes opaque and firm when cooked. This happens because heat causes the proteins in the egg to denature—they unfold from their original structure and reform into a new, solid arrangement.