PARADOXICAL
The faith chroniclesThursday, February 19, 2026
Cooking is Chemistry
Cooking is Chemistry
(If we look at cooking as essentially a laboratory experiment, food ingredients become chemical reagents that promise nuclear explosions and other such mini-disasters in the kitchen.)
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Forced by life's unexpected circumstances, I had to learn how to cook. If I didn't, I wouldn't eat, or just content myself with pre-cooked fare, or worse, fast food, or worst of all, canned goods. The experimental period -- which is still ongoing -- has brought me a heap of kitchen disaster stories.
One time while debating with myself in the kitchen, I insisted on including mature luffa into the smoldering misua (Chinese noodle) soup I was making. When lunchtime came, I was rewarded with the experience very much similar to chewing sliced bath towels. I was reminded that human beings, unlike cows, don’t have the enzymes needed to digest cellulose in a four-chambered stomach (i.e., reticulum, rumen, omasum and abomasum).
Cooking, I learned, is common sense or instinctive. There are certain ingredients that naturally go together, as though by synergy, like strawberries and cream. So you don't want to combine chemicals invented by man and Mother Nature that should never go together, like banana fruit with coffee or Coke, or you accidentally invent poison. One time, I was laughing my head off at this extreme example forwarded by Stef: pear and arugula smoothie with ginger and walnuts. Yes, some genius in the kitchen actually tried making it.
Okay, cooking is not really common sense, but actually chemistry. Filipino cuisine, in particular, is a lot of balancing act between acidity, saltiness, sweetness, and sometimes bitterness, so the equation always results in A x NaCl x S x B = umami.
But don't treat the kitchen too much as a laboratory -- the saucer as petri dish, the boiler as beaker, and the pots and pans as Erlenmeyer flask. People might mistake you for a mad scientist. I recall a departed aunt's story of how a homemaker in Pandacan, Manila, eagerly planned and prepared then elaborately presented a new dish of sweetish pork stew in milk for a buffet spread. Her dish came off as too exotic that not even one guest dared touch it. Of course, that one dish became the talk of the town in a place where people never associated milk with pork.
I have had my own lessons to learn in terms of experimentation. One time, out of love for cilantro, which I know a lot of people hate with a passion, I decided to use an extravagant amount for a dish I was cooking. I never expected that the exotic Chinese aroma would waft like a cloud from the house, invading neighborhood territory. Pretty soon, the neighbors started dialing the police's Narcotics Division, after sensing something was amiss.
Another time, I eagerly threw a whole bunch of basil leaves into a mung bean sprout Vietnamese recipe I was trying to copy. The entire house smelled like Colgate for three days.
Now, without exaggeration, this really happened to my grandmother, not out of the desire to experiment but in terms of making a new scientific discovery without intending it. One time, she said, she unknowingly mistook the kitchen rag for an ingredient in pinakbet (local vegetable stew). The soot-encrusted cloth revealed itself only at the bottom of the pot when everybody was already burping. Kitchen rags should be considered in the future as essential flavor-enhancer, going by the evidence, a good MSG substitute.
In a similar vein, there was a time I reheated a dish that unknowingly had turned sour. The discovery was made just a split second before shoveling the trash into my mouth. I sure was glad my nostrils were able to detect in time that something was wrong in the sourness -- not the usual pleasurable sourness of, say, sinigang, or I would have dealt with allergic attacks. There is a subtle difference, I have discovered, between acidity, fermentation, and spoilage.
Then there was also a time I fell in love with the flavor of ground pepper, so I indulged on it the first chance I got: I drizzled ground pepper generously on top of a piping hot rice porridge (lugaw). I couldn't count how many times I sneezed right after. The discovery? Not everything edible invented by God is good for you.
Disaster stories of other nature are a dime a dozen. During a house renovation, someone I won't name here (clue: a cousin's aunt) mistook the mound of white cement powder lying near the kitchen for the flour reserved for the sweet-and-sour pork balls. By the time everyone was hungry at lunch, we had to deal with the appalling scene of throwing out cemented minced pork balls from our mouths.
Nobody at home likes steamed veggies. I learned this lesson early, so to tempt people to eat healthy, I decided one day to brown assorted veggies on the pan after reading about how Maillard reaction (or the caramelization of sugars) is responsible for making food more delicious. The problem is I forgot the whole thing; I ended up broiling them to blackened state. Nobody likes charred food as well, I learned the hard way. I was also reminded that people might know by instinct that burnt protein is cancerous.
Out of sheer excitement, I once cooked a tomato-ey pork stew large enough for a family of ten, even though there were only three of us at the time. We ended up having the darned stew for two days of breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner -- plus of course, the reward of hyperacidity. Nobody had taught me that using baking soda would do the trick of counteracting the acidity.
On another fine day, I fell so in love with turmeric that I put turmeric in everything I cooked apart from curry. I put turmeric in fried egg, in stewed vegetables, in sautéed beans, etc. It's like there's an ongoing week-long Turmeric Festival. The results were varied: I discovered exotic new dishes, and I came up with something downright inedible.
But the turmeric fume, I found, is addictive. To be edible, I learned that turmeric must be chopped finely, if not ground finely into sprayable consistency. It is probably better than illegal recreational drugs. No other rival edibles come close as aromatherapy or as potpourri, save for lavender, lemon, apple, and orange scents.
After reading an article online about the virtues of eating at least 15 kinds of raw food every day, I went to a Mongolian hot bowl restaurant at the Mall of Asia in Pasay to try an old meal that I used to have there. I was sure it would give me my RDI (recommended daily intake) of 15 live enzymes from 15 half-cooked species into my bowl, so I threw the following plants into my DIY Mongolian mix:
15. carrot
14. cabbage
13. Chinese pechay
12. mongo sprouts
11. turnip strips
10. cucumber
9. tomato
8. leeks
7. young corn
6. peanuts
5. pineapple tidbits
4. onion
3. garlic
2. obviously since I can't eat rice raw, there should be celery too
Since one more raw food was missing, I scrounged around for an addition until I found a stand of freshly squeezed sugarcane juice somewhere in the mall's food court. That rounded out the list for the day. But nobody told me you could get dizzy with sugarcane juice due to the compound called policosanol combined with the shooting up of blood sugar levels.
My immune system was happy now. There was one major hitch, however: with everything half-cooked, the beef and pork strips I added as protein were stringy. (The chicken, squid rings, squid balls and fish balls I added on the side were fine.)
The biggest disappointment? This exercise in culinary titration hardly guaranteed a delicious meal. The slop tasted more like medicine, the way different perfumes mixed up together end up smelling foul, like urine. Even the Szechuan sauce failed to hold everything together. There must have been some redox reactions involved there, some proton exchanges that shouldn't have happened. What did I expect? Maybe I shouldn't have put in those cucumbers and pineapples so near each other.
In my excitement, I forgot that cooking involves chemicals, and there might be nature-identical reactants that, like I already said, don't like each other being paired together, unlike, say, tomato and broccoli, which reportedly go together fine. Apparently among certain biochemicals, there is some sort of cooperation or drug interaction at work. Quercetin in red onion and apple skin, bromelain in pineapple, and vitamin C reportedly work together as a natural antihistamine (to combat allergy), and there are other emerging studies like this. But I bet Filipinos have always known this by instinct with their endless riffs on dips (sawsawan), to bring all disparate elements together. The ingredients are not really standardized because, to suit one's taste, each bit is calibrated and re-calibrated to the angstrom and micron scales until one gets all the valence electrons cancelling out each other.
There are also other rules at play, like certain vitamins are water-soluble and some are fat-soluble, while some easily get destroyed by heat and some are not absorbed by the body if the food they come in are eaten raw. A study has shown that the fat in avocado, or olive oil, for example, in your tomato or vegetable salad will make the lycopene and other fat-soluble nutrients bioavailable; they would go down the drain otherwise.
Then then are what they call anti-nutrients. The phytate, phytic acid, and polyphenols in rice and beans, for instance, prevent our body from absorbing iron. Furthermore, soaking beans before cooking them, research says, "can help remove some of the oligosaccharides and make it easier for your body to break down the beans, making it less likely for you to have gas after eating them." Fruits and vegetables are similarly advised against as part of evening meal, as they result in gas.
There's also this new trick I've learned when dealing with carbs and sugar, which are alleged to be the top health culprit of all. As one nutritionist advised to those who refuse to go on a no-carbs or no-sugar diet, to observe not just portion control but also eating sugar together with fats and proteins to slow down the digestion and absorption. Another strategy in dealing with carbs is turning them into resistant starch by letting them cool first until they literally turn cold before reheating them prior to eating.
There are times when Einsteins in the kitchen need a break too from all that experimentation. One day, I found myself cursed by both laziness and penury, so I had not much choice. I subsisted on instant noodles and canned goods for days. I rendered much of the kitchen an irrelevant part of the house. In times like that, I discovered that the can opener is the only valuable laboratory tool.
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