[MUSIC] It appears as though humans have cook food since they were humans, which make a lot of sense. Because if you have one group of people who eat everything raw and another group that eats everything cooked, chances are the ones that eat everything raw are all going to die off because one of the important things about cooking is safety. There are bacteria in food, kill an animal for instance or you pick something out of the dirt and those bacteria can cause food poisoning. Which almost all of us have had at one time or another it's very unpleasant. In fact to much of that can give you even more serious illnesses then just food poisoning. If you cook food to 70 degrees centigrade, okay? And since there is still all of America, like where I'm from, that only really thinks in Fahrenheit, that's 160 degrees Fahrenheit. You will kill virtually, will kill all the bacteria. That's sort of your safety level. Now sometimes maybe you don't want to cook things that far. Hopefully it's nice and fresh and safe and you'll be fine. So safety is a big reason for cooking food. The other is digestibility. When you cook things, you change them from one substance to another. And I'll describe that in a little more detail. But it makes it easier for your body to digest it. Third reason is preservation like some hunk of raw meat and I have a piece of cooked meat. The cooked meat is going to stay edible for a longer period of time than the raw meat. Particularly if I cook it in a couple of different ways. Salting, it makes an environment so salty that nothing can eat it. And most of the salt products before you actually would eat it, you soak it in water to try to get rid of a lot of the salt. Or smoking, another way to preserve meats for a much longer period of time. This is called a smoker, and the key is that you put the wood underneath, and you need special wood, wood that has great flavor like hickory. And then there's a pan of water here. As long as we keep water in there, the temperature inside always stays below a hundred centigrade, 220 farenheit. And this means you can slowly cook your meat all day at a wonderful smoke temperature. Now because we had a whole pig. These are a part of the pig that most people never see, this is actually the cheeks. But the nice thing about it is it has some really yummy meat inside of it. So if I cook carbohydrates can get to a very important reaction. Called caramelization. This is the process by which first, a carbohydrate, which has a bunch of chains of glucose, gets broken down and the glucose changes to sucrose and fructose. Now those are regular old sugars. Those are the sugars that you taste like when you eat a sugar cube. Like this one. So turning the carbohydrates into sugars is one step. And this happens at the temperature range of maybe 110 to 180 centigrade. Of course, we want to put this into Fahrenheit as well. So this is maybe 230 F to 356 F. Man that's looking pretty good. All right. So we took a whole hog and we actually went to the place where they had slaughtered it and hung it and put it up. And we took off the head we took off the feet and this is 130 pounds of awesomeness. And it's been cooking pretty much all day. And at this point we're going to find out is it done. We gotta get this into the deep part of the muscle. Right, temperature's going up. Looking good. Yes, it's over 160 because that's the magic number for pork to make sure to kill all of anything that possibly could be bad inside of it. One of the important things of why you cook things is so you make it safer. Also makes it much more delicious. So we're actually very good. We're all the way up to 190 fahrenheit. So this pig is done. Now, we'll just slowly keep it warm, let the fat soak through with some extra chicory flavored smoke from our forest. This caramelization is first just creating those sugars, but then, around this number, this magic number, the next thing happens. If I heat the sugar cube, if I put a torch on it here, it actually turns into this golden brown liquid, caramel. In sense all foods, all carbohydrates can be converted to sugars and all those sugars have the potential of going into this brown colour. This is where a huge amount of taste of what you enjoy eating comes out. Because right at this temperature, you get an intense sweet flavor. I think you know that. If you actually ate the sugar cube, is it sweet? Sure. If you actually tasted this, the caramel, the intenseness of that sugar and that ability in your body to recognize that and say, wow, that is something really tasty. So that happens at 180. Now very interesting, if I get up to about 188, I'm losing the sweet spot here, This will still be sweet and this is at about 370 fahrenheit. But, at this point, the intenseness of the sweetness is going away. If I get a bit higher, if I get to 204 centigrade, which is 400 Fahrenheit It starts turning bitter. And if I keep going, it's going to just plain turn to carbon. It's just going to turn black and taste extremely burnt. And that is about 410. So when you cook things you're almost always in the oven. They always say put the oven at 350 in Fahrenheit or probably 180 in Centigrade and that's because you're going to be slightly caramelizing the sugars into the intense types of flavors and tastes that you like. Don't put the oven too high because it will burn. So this is a pan of bread and you want to bake it. And there's another interesting thing that happens in cooking and baking, bread rises. That's because you've actually put a little critter in it, yeast, and as it eats the sugar it make carbon dioxide. Why is that important? Well, if I now cut through a piece of bread you can see all these air bubbles and those air bubbles are that CO2 bubbles that were produced and as you bake it, the CO2, the dough turns the carbohydrates cross length. They become a bit sweeter because of this caramelization reaction, and you notice that even around the right top you start getting this brown crust, which again is part of this reaction going to the higher temperatures. And the air bubbles are inside, they're really CO2 bubbles from the CO2 from the yeast. Well you know bread, caramelization, that's kind of the boring stuff, the really good stuff is grilling meat. What happens when you got this Looks pretty yummy but, obviously, raw. You want to turn in into this. Man, I don't know about you but I'm getting hungry. So, the process that does this is a reaction called the Maillard Reaction. It's kind of pronounced dumb. And this reaction is fairly complex, but it has to do with both, when you have proteins like meat, and you have the carbohydrates, the starches. And that's pretty much, all foods are going to have these two things. You have the proteins and carbohydrates and you heat them and you begin getting a series of complex reactions. This whole Maillard reaction chain. But that's the key, that it's going to take the proteins, going to turn them into sugars and then that going to make them much more digestible in the process. Now, if I take just protein, like egg white and I cook it, you all know because I'm sure you've done it, that it's going to turn into something harder, right? The egg white goes from a liquid, with the right temperature, to something that's solid. Well, eggs are a little bit different because most of the time, when you cook the proteins, you will unravel them, they will fall apart. And that falling apart aids in digestions. Because this reaction will take the proteins and break them down into things your bodies can use directly, like the amino acids. So the cooking process aids in your ability to digest it. It also unlocks a whole, rich cast of various flavors. In eggs, what happens, is those proteins unwrap but then they join up with others. It's like you had a bunch of small little packets, and now as they unravel, they link together and cross link. So even though in a way you're breaking down the protein, you've enabled them to crosslink and that's why a white turns into a solid when it's cooked. But of course, if you ever heat anything far enough you'll burn it and basically turn it back into the carbon and elemental compounds that it was in the beginning. That's what you need to know about grilling, cooking, smoking. [MUSIC]
