Chapter 7 Further Reading — Proteins

Beginner

  • Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking (Scribner, 2004), Chapter 3 (Eggs) and Chapter 4 (Meat). The single most accessible and authoritative discussion of cooking-as-protein-chemistry. Read the egg chapter; it's the best 30-page introduction to what this chapter is teaching. Available in most public libraries.

  • Kenji López-Alt, The Food Lab (W.W. Norton, 2015), the chapter on eggs. López-Alt's experimental rigor is remarkable. He runs side-by-side experiments on essentially every egg-cooking variable and shows you the results photographically. The temperature staircase is visible on his pages.

  • Samin Nosrat, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat (Simon & Schuster, 2017), the "Heat" section. Nosrat does not use the word "denaturation," but everything in her heat section is denaturation explained without the chemistry vocabulary. Wonderful for the home cook who wants to feel rather than calculate.

Intermediate

  • Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young, and Maxime Bilet, Modernist Cuisine (The Cooking Lab, 2011), Volume 1, Chapter on Heat and Energy; Volume 3, Chapter on Eggs. Modernist Cuisine is expensive ($600+ for the full set) but in many libraries. The visualizations of how heat propagates through an egg are without equal. The pages on protein denaturation are written for the technically-curious cook and bridge popular and academic levels.

  • Amy Rowat et al., The Science Behind the Stove (online open-access course materials, UCLA). Free online course materials from the UCLA Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology. Includes lab protocols, lecture notes, and video demonstrations of protein denaturation. Search "Amy Rowat science of cooking UCLA."

  • The Cooking Issues podcast (Heritage Radio Network), various episodes on emulsions and eggs. Hosted by Dave Arnold and Nastassia Lopez. Long-form, deeply technical, often hilarious. Search the archive for "hollandaise," "emulsion," and "sous vide eggs."

Advanced

  • Belitz, Grosch, and Schieberle, Food Chemistry (5th ed., Springer, 2009), Chapter 1 (Amino Acids, Peptides, Proteins). The graduate-level reference for food protein chemistry. Detailed mechanisms, kinetic data, structural diagrams. If you are serious about food science, this book belongs on your shelf.

  • Fennema's Food Chemistry (5th ed., CRC Press, 2017), Chapter 6 (Proteins). The North American counterpart to Belitz. Equally rigorous, slightly different organization. Both are standard textbooks in food-science graduate programs.

  • Charles Tanford and Jacqueline Reynolds, Nature's Robots: A History of Proteins (Oxford University Press, 2003). Not a food-science book, but a beautifully written history of how scientists came to understand what a protein is. Provides the deep background for everything in this chapter and goes well beyond cooking. Excellent for the food-science student who wants the full intellectual context.

  • Stephen Yeates et al., "Shear-stress-mediated refolding of proteins from aggregates and inclusion bodies." ChemBioChem 16 (2015): 393–396. The actual scientific paper on the "unboiling an egg" research. Demonstrates that lysozyme (one egg-white protein) can be partially refolded after denaturation using shear forces. Good for the student who wants to see what "irreversible" actually means in practice and where the edges of that statement are.

  • Hans-Dieter Belitz et al., "Protein structure and function in food," in Food Chemistry (Belitz 2009), Chapter 1, sections 1.4 (Physical Properties), 1.5 (Chemical Reactions and Modifications), and 1.6 (Modification of Texture by Proteins). The most concentrated technical treatment of how proteins modify food texture, with mechanisms and quantitative data on denaturation kinetics, water-binding capacity, foaming, and gelation. Required reading for food science students.