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Ingredients Series I: Acid

There are ingredients, and then there are Ingredients. An ingredient is what we’re used to thinking about in the kitchen – things like tomatoes, tortillas, or tarragon. An Ingredient is what those things are made of. There are millions of ingredients, but only eight Ingredients: Water, Sugars, Carbs, Lipids, Proteins, Minerals, Gases, and Heat.

Each Ingredient has a personality, a set of tricks that it can play in any recipe. Did you make something too sticky? Sugars are to blame, regardless of whether they came from a jar of honey or some fresh sweet corn. Something turn out smelly, in a bad way? It’s always going to have something to do with Lipids, which can come from anywhere – fish and French fries to lemons and garlic. Want to make a sauce, batter, or puree thicker? Your best bets are Carbs and Proteins, and you can find them in everything from veal bones to apple cores. This series is about learning to see beneath the surface of food, exposing the moving parts that cause every failure and every triumph in every kitchen on the planet. This isn’t a list of stuff to memorize; it’s a bootcamp to give you culinary x-ray vision.

You can apply this mindset to any recipe or technique, regardless of your skill level or how you like to cook. Home cooks will feel ready to take on any recipe, and restaurant cooks will feel prepared for anything that comes out of the fire.

Beginners will have a lifeline if something goes wrong, and masters will improve dishes they’ve been cooking for years. Fans of old school cuisine will understand classic preparations like never before, and the innovation-minded will advance the art of cooking even further.

We romanticize and glorify secret ingredients, but to universally improve how we cook, we should be talking about the secrets of Ingredients.

Ali Bouzari is the chief science officer and a co-founder of Pilot R+D, a culinary development company based in northern California. Ali began cooking in restaurant kitchens while studying biochemistry as an undergraduate. In 2011, at the age of 23, he started teaching at The Culinary Institute of America while obtaining his Ph.D. in food biochemistry from the University of California, Davis. For his dissertation, Ali stayed true to his roots as a cook and collaborated with the French Laundry to study a uniquely culinary topic: cooking vegetables sous vide. This interaction jump started his career as a consultant to the culinary industry, allowing him to work closely with some of the most innovative restaurants in the country, including Benu, Bar Tartine, SPQR, State Bird Provisions, The Restaurant at Meadowood, Eleven Madison Park, and The Thomas Keller Restaurant Group. Ali is writing a groundbreaking book on how food works, to be published by Ecco in fall 2016. He is also a contributor to the forthcoming edition of Modernist Cuisine. Ali has been asked to speak about culinary science at national science conferences, top universities, NPR, and multiple TED conferences. He was recently honored as part of Zagat’s and Forbes’s 30 Under 30 lists.