Culinary Reactions: The Everyday Chemistry of Cooking Illustrated Edition, Kindle Edition

As a homeschooling teacher, I was very excited about this book and the chance to teach some basic solid chemistry and food science. I paid extra for the shipping as this book had to travel all the way to Belgium to fit into our curriculum for this year and was recommended by other homeschooling families. However, as I reviewed the book, I am sorry to say I was disappointed and will only use it minimally. The writing is brilliant but clearly written by a chemist with little experience teaching children at a basic level. I am a Nutritionist with a minor in Biology and have a college-level mastery of chemistry but I felt the chemical concepts taught were not well organized for chemistry nor for food science. The reading is choppy, the recipes are a bit strange with hard to get ingredients, and overall the flow of the book was not good. Blending the two sciences is brilliant but, in my opinion, this book is not suitable to use as a guide for teaching the basics of either one. Perhaps it was written for a very specific audience, but it was not useful for middle and high school science. Too bad.

While this book is informative, and scientifically accurate, it is completely disorganized. The author will ask a question such as why do we sift flour, then go off on a tangent about why you should weight eggs, just to come back and say sifting flour isn't all that important anymore. Additionally, the topics covered in a single chapter often are not all that related. For example alongside the flour conversation was a conversation about how to test for bad eggs and how to estimate the calories in the meal.However, there is still some great science in this book. In between explaining things such as the difference between egg foam and fat foam, the author would outline topics like how to read an organic molecule diagram. This definitely has it’s pro’s and con’s. For me as a soon to be Chemical Engineering graduate, it’s great, it keeps me intrigued by talking shop about chemistry. To the average reader without a STEM degree, it might be a little overwhelming, verging on completely useless.The never ending stream of science facts kind of take away from this book being about food. The author does go into great detail into many things that it would be helpful to know in the kitchen. However he often does not tie an idea back to cooking after he has fleshed it out. For example the chapter on fats and oils did not really leave me with many cooking tricks but much more knowledgeable about the organic structure of different types of fats. The fact that it doesn't exactly cover the science well enough and isn’t really a cookbook makes it difficult to see what this author was going for or what he wanted the reader to get out of it. It does also concern me that people with less knowledge in chemistry are potentially learning some of the more difficult parts of chemistry through a cookbook.For those of you with a science background looking for a textbook to tell you what's happening in the kitchen, this book is for you. You will relearn many of the topics you cover in organic and general chemistry, in the context of cooking. However if you are a science novice looking for advanced cooking techniques you seem to be out of luck. Additionally, I wish it covered more of the health effects of food, and how different foods affect our bodies. This seems like a great venue for that kind of information and I was left disappointed it was missing.A side note, I read this book on kindle, and did not at all like the formating. The pages really felt like a wall of text and there were not nearly enough diagrams of some of the organic chemistry lessons. An inclusion of more visual aids would definetly help a lot of readers understand some of the chemistry better.

This is an amazing book! Not a textbook, not a cookbook, but something in between. I have been using this to teach chemistry to my sons (14&15). They can now confidently bake bread with NO RECIPE because they understand the science behind it. Next up is cheese-making for us.I love this book so much I bought a copy for my mom for her birthday. Every cook should have this on their shelf.

Mr. Field took on an impossible task. His first sentence in Introduction, "Your mother was a chemist." is patently true. But when he tried to give you a taste of your mother's chemistry cum cooking, he failed. He failed because he attempted something impossible. Cooking is not only chemistry and physical chemistry with some physics thrown into the pot, it is a very complex high-level science. To understand cooking chemistry you have to be a top-level chemist, physical chemist, biochemist, and reasonably well-read microbiologist - all things that Mr. Field is not and the lay reader is not for sure. Actually, only good Food Chem engineers fit this category, and those do it well in their particular areas of expertise.So we are left with trivia, some interesting, some slightly pretentious, some partly wrong. And a few cute-to-wow(!) recipes, but hardly enough to call it an accidental cookbook. Nora Efron's "Heartburn" was better in this department. Beyong the fact that one cannot do this in less than 800 pages and a BSc in Chemistry with a Major in Biochemistry, there are real flops here. At the lay level that Mr. Field writes for, most of the chemical formulas are totally unnnecessary. His explanation of chemical bonds is at best inaccurate and does not really contribute to one's understanding of baking bread (which, BTW, is one of the better culinary foreys in this book), and most of his diagrams are making lay person as befuddled as before. Why, I ask, should the reader peruse the relationship between sugar concentration and solution boiling point? To show that its exponential? How does it contribute to understanding cooking? Beats me. Likewise the pH table, which has no meaning without understanding the concept of Molarity and Normality in concentration. The physical chem calculations of scaling-up are a bit mixed up and in his example of a bread loaf, mistaken. And why extract DNA from squash? Will it make you a better baker of the pumpkin pie? I strongly suggest your granny, or at least Fannie Farmer. In a nutshell, much ado about very little, and, like most bad cooking - mostly spices and salt.

It is a reasonably interesting read, with a number of explanations of the everyday occurrences that happen in the kitchen. You get explanations for various kitchen phenomena, such as why meat dries out and needs to rest, why red wine can turn blue when washing up, or an explanation of what makes a saturated fat.The science isn't overwhelming, although I wouldn't recommend it to anyone without a reasonable recollection of school chemistry. The book does tend to confuse itself with a textbook at times. There are various, rather inconsequential, boxes that explain dry chemical concepts which are not particularly relevant to the text. The chapters are organised along chemical rather than culinary lines, which can make it feel a bit fragmented, and certainly more difficult to use as a reference for a particular cooking technique.There is a wealth of practical information available within the pages, although the translations from theory to kitchen feel a bit half-hearted and grow scarcer as the book continues until its rather abrupt conclusion.Overall there is enough interesting information within to make the book worth buying, but it could be a bit sharper, a bit thinner and a bit more consistent.

Even better then expectation. Looks like a cheap book, but is full of even more questions and answer to topics that might come to mind but we are too shy to ask because they seem too easy. All contents are organized clearly. Lots of info

In my opinion , the book is a good read for anyone who attempted to cook anything a little bit more sophisticated than scrambled eggs.

Very interesting book. My scientist brother was very happy to receive it.

Lots of really good information - readable science - should be a very useful book. Looks well written easy to understand. Only negative is all pictures in black and white. Excellent service - delivery, arrived when stated