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we have to start by thinking a little bit about what food is made out of,
because after all it is the constituents of food which
will be the major player in this adventure
that we're about to launch ourselves on.
Let's just start with a very basic fact, which is that all of us
and all of our food is made of molecules.
Now, there are simple molecules.
There's the molecules that's in the air around us.
There's for example, carbon dioxide.
There's oxygen. There's water.
These are simple molecules.
They, of course, themselves are composed of atoms.
So carbon dioxide is composed of carbon and oxygen. Water
is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, and so on.
Food molecules are more complex than atoms,
and they're also more complex than simple molecules.
The molecules of cooking-- namely fats, proteins, and carbohydrates-tend to be much larger molecules which themselves also
contain atoms such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and so on.
And one of the unusual things about cooking
is that the basic molecules of food, the basic fats, the basic sugars,
that we will talk about tend to form very large networks or sort
of agglomerated structures, which are what make up the structure of food.
And also, actually, for that matter, of us.
So let's just start with fats.
So fats are very common.
So examples of common fats that you might eat with
include olive oil, coconut oil, cocoa butter, shortening.
And fat has two features that I would like to highlight right now.
So the first is that fats can either be in liquid or in solid form
at room temperature.
And indeed, there are fats that are liquids.
There are fats that are solids at room temperature.
So the second feature of fats is that fats don't dissolve in water.
That's why when you try to make salad dressing
and you mix oil and water-- for example, olive oil and water-you will notice that the olive oil does not actually mix itself in the water.
Even if you take your bottle of olive oil and water and shake it up rapidly,
they will, if you let it sit for while on the countertop,
separate into the oil being on top and the water being beneath it.
And that is because oil and water don't mix with each other.
Or said differently, oil doesn't dissolve in water.
Now, this is sort of one of the defining features of oil,
and it is very different than the two other major components of food.
So now let's talk a little bit about carbohydrates.
So carbohydrates consist basically of sugars-- sucrose, the sweet taste
that you tend to eat if you're trying to eat
something sweet-- and also chains of sugars, which are starches,
or sort of longer chain sugars.
These are the two main types of carbohydrates that exist in your food.
So either sugars or sugar chains.
Now, sugars actually have their own interesting properties.
So one property of sugar, which at least I find interesting,
is that sugar is really a very hard substance.
That is, if you try to crush a solid piece of sugar,
it's a very difficult to do.
So for example, imagine taking rock candy.
Rock candy is really a solid.
It doesn't squish it all.