When you’re cooking food, you’re a chemist! Each time you adhere to or adjust a recipe you are experimenting with acids and bases, emulsions and suspensions, gels and foams. In your kitchen you denature proteins, crystallize compounds, react enzymes with substrates, and nurture preferred microbial existence while suppressing dangerous microbes. And unlike inside a laboratory, you are able to eat your tests to verify your hypotheses. In Culinary Reactions, author Simon Quellen Field explores the chemistry behind the about Culinary Reactions: The Everyday Chemistry of Cooking meals you follow each day. How does altering the percentage of flour, glucose, yeast, salt, butter, and water influence how high loaf of bread rises? Why is whipped cream made out of nitrous oxide rather than the more common carbon dioxide? And just why does Hollandaise sauce fall for ‘clarified’ butter? This easy-to-follow primer even includes recipes to demonstrate the concepts getting talked about, including Whipped Creamsicle Topping (a foam), Cherry Desire Cheese (a proteins gel), and Lemonade with Chameleon Eggs (an acidity indicator). It also shows you how to remove DNA from a Halloween pumpkin. You’ll never take a look at your graduated cylinders, Bunsen burners, and beakers the same manner again.