Once the world of science and food was seen as the final frontier of cooking; a wonderland of flavour, texture and invention. Now foams, dusts and soils are only mentioned when they are crusted onto a forager’s welly. Enough I say! It is time to turn our back on the Luddites of the ladle, these flat-earthers with their food mills and forage flora. For what is cookery if not chemistry – albeit with a little biology thrown in?

1. Science is knowledge and knowledge is power

Sure, you can’t yet run your fridge on your brain waves, but the knowledge that science can give you on the kitchen can save you just as many dollars. Whether it’s making things cheaper such as creamy scrambled eggs without adding any expensive cream (because you know that if you keep the eggs cooking under the temperature that their proteins harden, they will be naturally creamy).

2. Science can defeat irrelevant dogma

If I hear another chef banging on about how searing meat seals in the flavour, I’ll throw my griddle pan at them. Searing doesn’t seal in flavour. The king of food science writers, Harold McGee, pointed this out back in 1984 when he observed that if it did, then juices wouldn’t bubble up through the seared side when cooking the second side of a steak. What searing does is brown the meat which gives us those toasty umami flavours we love so much. It’s called the Maillard reaction.

3. Science can make things better

Science is all about experiments and it is through experimentation that we also know that meat appears more tender if cut across the grain, that a little salt can make things taste less bitter (which is why bitter melon and black bean are such a classic Chinese combination) and that, more obviously, sugar doesn’t remove acidity, but rather just masks it a little. Science can also take the credit for explaining why certain flavours gel. It all comes down to the flavour compounds that each ingredient has and how they work together. We have this research to thank for such new combos as green peppercorns with mango, coffee with lamb, and red cabbage with seeded mustard.

4. Science can make things safer

This is the major one… but it’s not just the big stuff like pasteurisation, curing and identification of poisonous plants where science has helped us out, but also in explaining more everyday dangers – like why you should never blend hot soup in a sealed blender, without actually having to experience the soup exploding all over your kitchen first hand.

5. Science helps you understand stuff

Without science we wouldn’t know why we can’t taste when we have a cold (because we largely ‘taste’ with our noses) and why we want more salt when we are stressed (that’s because stressed people taste less acutely). It is science too that told us that both sounds and colour have a huge impact on how we perceive flavours. Most importantly of all, it can explain why peanut butter tastes better hooked straight out of the jar on a finger – it’s all to do with the weight of the jar!