Raise your hand if you’ve ever burned eggs on the lowest of your frying pan. Now that it’s clear that we are amongst pals take consolation in understanding this truth: It’s not all your fault.
It’s science we should blame. Partially, besides.
Let’s start with the one’s eggs. “Most pans, even the truly appropriate ones, are simply filled with little cracks and crevices,” says Joseph Provost, a chemistry and biochemistry professor at the University of San Diego who co-wrote The Science of Cooking: Understanding the Biology and Chemistry Behind Food and Cooking. When the pan is heated, the metallic expands, permitting the egg to get trapped in those microscopic cracks, where it sticks and burns.
Eggs virtually have two matters operating against them: Their liquid flows into those cracks, and their proteins are problematic.
As Harold McGee explains in Keys to Good Cooking: A Guide to Making the Best of Foods and Recipes, “High heat causes meals proteins and carbohydrates to form bonds with the pan floor.” In keeping with the Royal Society of Chemistry, “protein-rich ingredients are specifically liable to sticking because the proteins can form complexes with metallic atoms, including iron, inside the pan.”
See, it is not just you. McGee writes that Sticking is extraordinarily intricate regarding raw ingredients, including eggs and fish.
But it is merely as traumatic with sturdier pieces of meat, too. Chicken and lean red meat are liable to stick because they’re excessive in protein but low in fats, Provost says. Without tons of fat to lubricate the floor between the pan and the meals, the meat will stick.
