Enzymes

There’s a particular group of proteins that are important to the cook not so much for their direct contribution to food texture and consistency, but for the way they change the other components of the food they’re in. These proteins are the enzymes. Enzymes are biological catalysts: that is, they increase the rate of specific chemical reactions that otherwise would occur only very slowly, if at all. Enzymes thus cause chemical change. Some enzymes build molecules up, or modify them; some break molecules down. Human digestive enzymes, for example, break proteins into individual amino acids, and starch into individual glucose units. A singe enzyme molecule can catalyze as many as a million reactions per second.