Food for Thought: Crunchy, Chewy, Creamy, Yummy

Abstract

Thermodynamics always wins. At least, that’s what I say in my thermo class, sometimes remembering to append “Eventually.” That “eventually” is important - if your grandparents, like mine, cooked soup to boiling, you perhaps had the experience of watching an ice cube dropped into a steaming bowl of soup. It melts, and the temperature equilibrates across the soup-system, and while it’s pretty rapid, the squirming and hungry three-year-old-me would tell you quite loudly that it was NOT instantaneous (had I known that word at the time). A component of freshness for many foods the world-over is how far from equilibrium that food is, with the off-the-shelf version a merely ok stand-in for what food-X ought to taste like. The transient behavior of food materials turns out to be la difference betw