Appetites: How to boost your cooking game with science

There's a method to making food good. It's the scientific method.

Dan Souza and Molly Brinbaum, executive editors for Cook's Science, know that well.

They spoke to All Things Considered host Tom Crann from American's Test Kitchen in Boston. The 2,500 square foot kitchen is home to 50 test cooks who develop recipes every day. Cooks take a recipe and make five versions of it, taking the best elements of each to make one ideal version of a dish.

Cooking well is a bit like making music. Musicians typically learn technique before they begin to improvise, for example.

Understanding how different chords and collections of notes work is similar to knowing about ingredients, Souza said.

Once you have success with a recipe, Souza said, "the next time you make that dish, absolutely you can play with it and you understand that if you cook this egg dish a little bit more you'll get a firmer texture out of it because you understand a little bit more about how eggs work."

One thing people often confuse when discussing food, though, is the difference between taste and flavor.

Brinbaum says people often use the words interchangeably, which isn't correct.

Taste is what your taste buds can perceive: salty, sweet, bitter, sour and umami — nothing more.

Flavor is everything else that comes into your brain's final perception of the food. That's largely its smell, but it also includes texture, temperature, color and even sound.

There's a lot of science at play in cooking. For more, use the audio player above to hear the full interview.

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