Cooking is math. Why else would there be measuring utensils for half teaspoons, quarter teaspoons, and one-third cups? If you've ever doubled or quadrupled a recipe for a batch of cookies, you know you need to be able to add and/or multiply fractions.
Cooking is chemistry. Aside from baking soda (sodium bicarbonate or NaHCO3) and baking powder (typical formulation: 30% sodium bicarbonate, 5-12% monocalcium phosphate or Ca(H2PO4)2, and 21-26% sodium aluminium sulfate or NaAl(SO4)2·12H2O), there's the way butter leaves little pockets of goodness in biscuits or how yeast makes dough rise or the way sugar caramelizes when heated.
I have a friend who was an organic chemistry professor who had a student who complained, "I can't cook!" She would reply, "Of course you can! " The student repeated her lament so my friend said, "Just treat it as an experiment." Two days later, the student came back exclaiming, "I can cook!"
While I'm a trained chemist, I don't really know how the ingredients in a recipe work. I follow a recipe like a lab manual and get to work. Then people say, "Wow! That tastes good!" to which I sometimes reply something like, "Thank Julia" or "Thank Simon".
Because of this, I've decided to spend a little more energy learning why ingredients go together or why this tastes good with that. Sometimes I like to experiment but I'd really rather establish a good foundation first. Besides, some of my experiments don't turn out so well.
With that in mind, here are some resources to get started.
Books
Culinary Reactions: The Everyday Chemistry of Cooking on Amazon
I haven't read this yet but if it's in the public library, I'll try it.
Slideshow
This slideshow was created by Dr Nancy Mills, Murchison Professor of Chemistry at Trinity University and is served up by Texas A & M University. Along with chemical reactions are recipes to help demonstrate some of her points.
Videos
Chemistry Now is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Not all of the videos are related to food but quite a few are. One series is based on the cheeseburger.
Websites
How to Improve Your Home Cooking with the Power of Science on Lifehacker
This is a great introduction to using science in the kitchen. I don't know why I never kept a notebook of my cooking forays. I always did for my lab experiments.
This is one of many free courses available on the MIT OpenCourseWare website. I haven't taken it yet but I bookmark it here to attend to it later.
Sponsored by San Francisco's Exploratorium, this website hasn't been updated since July 2003 but it's a nice place to start since the collection of articles and videos is small.
What’s the Chemistry of Cooking? at Science Week
This article describes the chemical or physical changes in a few of the more common food preparations. It's sponsored by Science Foundation Ireland.
That's it for today's Foodie Friday. If you have a favorite science in the kitchen channel, let me know in the Comments below.