Food & Entropy

Some people say that they can’t bake, even if they’re good cooks. Other people (fewer in my experience) say that they’re really good bakers, but can’t really cook. There’s a big difference between the two activities.

First, entropy. Entropy is a physics concept that is essentially a measure of disorder. A neat stack of bricks is highly ordered: low entropy. Knocking over that stack of bricks results in something less ordered: high entropy. The less structure, the more smeared together and uniformly distributed, the higher the entropy.

Cooking increases entropy. Take a steak and put it on the grill: the highly ordered muscle tissue and marbled fat begins to break down so that we can better digest it. Burn that steak and you increase its entropy even more. Take a pile of vegetables and chop them up with your new laser knife into little cubes and you have greater disorder; higher entropy. Sauté those vegetables and you increase the entropy a bit more. Soup is very high entropy: all of those highly-ordered ingredients you started with are now swirling around in a pot all together, breaking down into delicious disorder.

This makes a certain amount of sense: plants and animals are highly ordered when they’re alive; less so after they die. In order for us to digest anything and use the nutrients, we have to break down food into smaller and simpler compounds: that’s cooking in a nutshell.

Contrast this with baking. Baking also involves mixing a bunch of separate ingredients together, but in very specific sequences. Dry ingredients can get mixed together, sure, but some recipes require you to fold in the egg whites separately from the yolks, or letting the yeast work with the sugar before adding the salt and flour. The precise amount of water used is a significant factor.

Baking ultimately creates structure and order where there wasn’t any before. Cookies, cakes, pies (especially crust!), a Mille-feuille or a Dobos torte are all highly ordered: they might have distinct layers or boundaries, they have a specific texture borne of the heat during baking, they may have intricate decorations or flourishes. This is what makes baking a careful and patient enterprise: to create something with an intricate structure requires that we push back against Nature’s tendency toward disorder.

I think it’s telling that baking is a relatively recent invention, long preceded by roasting and fermentation. Baking is almost an extravagance: building something up so that we can enjoy breaking it down.