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I’m a huge fan of “molecular gastronomy”, the new school of cooking that studies the chemistry and physics of food to improve its flavour (described as “the scientific study of deliciousness”). It’s the “mad scientist” thing that has made people like Heston Blumenthal famous – but it’s always been pitched as something that only Expert Chefs can do.

Which is total rubbish.

For example, most non-skilled cooks I’ve met are distinctly scared of cooking chicken – they know that it can give you all sorts of nasty food poisoning, and they know that you have to cook it well enough to stop that – but how do you know how well is well? How do you tell if the insides are done? How do you avoid overcooking it whilst at the same time avoiding poisoning people? Traditionally, there are all sorts of tricks that experienced cooks use to figure out if their chicken is done, but a lot of it boils down to experience. With no guidelines, cooking chicken is a bit of a scary experience for a newbie cook.

Unless, that is, you happen to know a couple of scientific facts. You know, say, that all the bacteria in the chicken will be dead, dead, dead if the interior has hit 65 degrees C for a couple of minutes. You know that, the meat won’t get seriously overcooked until it hits 75-80 degrees or so. There’s no judgement or experience required here – they’re just facts.

But you’ve still got the problem of the interior. How do you tell if the meat’s done in the middle? Do you prod and try and guess from the texture? Do you trust to experience?

No, you use a fuckin’ thermometer. You stick it into the middle of the chicken, and then you, you know, read the dial. Or LCD. Or whatever.

And then you, erm, actually KNOW when the chicken’s ready to go. Rather than, effectively, having to make an informed guess. No wonder so many people find conventional cooking so terrifying.

That’s why science helps. Because rather than cookery based on experience, guesswork, half-understood theories and inflexible lists of “things that worked before”, you can actually use reasoning to make your food. And, in my experience, it makes damn good stuff.

And there’s more. Knowing about the science allows you to extend the ways in which you cook, based on the theoretical properties of your food, rather than having to rely on blind trial-and-error. For example, knowing about the way that meat dries up and becomes unpalatable led several chefs, notably Heston Blumenthal, to investigate low-temperature cookery – which home cooks can use, in turn, to avoid problems with roast chicken, for example. Because of the physics of the chicken’s water content, the speed temperature transmits, and the oven it’s placed in, low-temperature roast chicken nearly solves the “dry chicken” problem of a roast that cooks have struggled with for centuries.

Want to know more about Molecular Gastronomy? I’d recommend, most of all, “On Food and Cooking” by Harold McGee (get it from our shop, which is the one-stop shop for all things food sciencey. A lighter read is “Don’t Sweat The Aubergine” (also in the shop), which uses scientific approaches and testing based on works from people like McGee. In the blogosphere, Martin `Khymos` Lersch is the man when it comes to chemistry in the kitchen. And, of course, we’ll be throwing out the science all the time on KKCook, in between the explosions and Top Gear impressions.