dpcalder

That's what I'm worried about. Is there any way I can obtain theoretical knowledge through biology and chemistry of how the meal will taste, or is this purely a subjective and experiential issue?

My goal is more or less to be an apologist for foods consumed by traditional cultures which have been shown to have a great deal of nutritional value but which are not widely known in the Western world. I want to argue that we can get all of our nutrients from replacing certain of our more conventional foods with these foods, and I want to create unique twists on conventional meals that combine our own conventional foods with foods from other cultures on the grounds that they are easy to grow and a lot cheaper, so that if these foods became more widely available in the West, we'd be able to more cheaply and efficiently produce these foods. I just want to be able to knowledgeably say stuff like "we normally combine such and such two foods, but we can replace this one food article with that of another, although we might want to alter the preparation in such and such a way to make them compatible, or we might want to prepare this new food in such and such a way to make it compatible with the more conventional one." Because I don't have access to these materials, I will require recourse almost entirely to theoretical knowledge rather than practical experience, but my aim is precisely to popularize such foods to contribute to their becoming more readily available. I will acknowledge in my writing that it's purely theoretical and might require adjustment should these foods become more popular, of course. But I want to be able to attain such as precision as possible with theoretical knowledge. Right now I'm wondering about the extent and the nature of the limitations I might run into with purely theoretical knowledge.

How important is practical experimentation if I am going to write a book about things that have never been cooked before? Here's my situation and the reason for my question: I want to write about replacing certain parts of conventional Western dishes with more exotic foods from other cultures. So I will be writing about food combinations which are likely unpopular, if not unprecedented because of their strangeness. The problem is that I will likely never have hands-on access to the kinds of foods that I want to use. What I'm wondering is if it's possible to have sufficient theoretical knoweldge of the chemistry/biology of the foodstuffs in question to be able to knowledgeably write about what sorts of combinations are most likely to be healthiest and tastiest, how the certain foods ought to or ought to not be combined, prepared, cooked, in order to have a palatable or healthy meal. Is something like this feasible without actual experimentation? Can theoretical knoweldge, even relatively exhaustive theoretical knoweldge, of the biology or chemistry of the kinds of foods I want to use, replace hands-on practical experimentation, or will I not be taken seriously in the food science and culinary arts world unless I've actually prepared the meals I'm writing about?

Obviously we should be leery of anything we find on the internet, but are there cookbooks available for free online that are universally celebrated and/or considered legitimate by the cooking community at large?

Well I am referring to some academic studies of the nutritional content of certain meats per 100g. I'm trying to provide a dietary guide for those interested in obtaining their nutrients from these meats.

I am calculating the nutritional content of a certain food per 100g. To simplify things a bit, I am rounding the data up and down to the nearest tenth. So for example, if it has 1.6 micrograms of selenium, I simply write 2 micrograms. If it has 4.3 milligrams of Vitamin C, I write 4 milligrams. Is this a legitimate way of going about it, or are there at least some vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acids, etc. any sort of nutrient content where the smallest nuances in measurement matter such that total precision is required?

Any recommendations or standards in the field? I'm trying to find some literature on food science and preparation in general, how to prepare food, what to mix with what, what not to mix with what, etc. Any suggestions? I'm basically just a n00b trying to learn about the field.