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Cooking, at its most basic, is how we enable the transfer of energy from heat sources in order to get ingredients to reach a desirable stage where it looks, smells and tastes delicious. Encouraging molecules and sugars in food to interact with heat and have chemical reactions that alter the taste and textures, is the essence of engaging in the activity. To some, cooking might be a way of unwinding and to some, an everyday chore that must be undertaken in order to put food on the table; whichever way you might look at it, it is necessary to have an understanding of why heat and temperature are distinctly different from one another, and how it affects everything else we do while cooking.
When energy is transferred from a heat source to food, it converts the composition of the proteins, carbohydrates and fats and accelerates the occurrence of chemical reactions. Permanent during most times, these chemical reactions also change the physical structure of ingredients when they come in contact with heat. For example, when you wilt cabbage or spinach in a pan, the appearance, texture and taste of these leafy greens are altered forever. While it might seem confusing at first to wrap your head around why heat and temperature are two different elements, heat on its own, is the energy derived from molecules that vibrate at a higher frequency with one another.
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Usually transferrable, from one form to another, heat is applied to food in a way where a pan is placed over a heat source, in which ingredients are thrown in, for the cooking process to commence. This energy, apart from caramelising sugars, wilting greens and browning meats, can also be used to enable the evaporation of moisture or to maintain optimum warmth of food, until it cooks evenly and is ready to be eaten. Temperature, on the other hand, is a way in which how much energy is applied to a system, is measured. To determine the temperature at which a function takes place in cooking, two key factors – density and heat capacity must be taken into consideration.
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The density of a substance is usually how tightly packed together the molecules are whereas the heat capacity is the amount of energy it would take to get a substance or material to a specific temperature. To illustrate this further, while vegetables like zucchini or carrots might be ‘dense’ vegetables, their heat capacity is lower than a chicken breast which might take longer to cook through completely, due to its molecules being denser. Hence, depending on the quantity of energy applied to a pan or pot, the temperature of the food cooking in it shall vary accordingly.
