I'm certainly no chef, and am only somewhat familiar with one particular side of chemistry (physical chemistry) but I don't see how it would be useful in cooking. Unless you count boiling water as chemistry.
The logic behind organic extractions, the temperatures at which different things oxidize or otherwise degrade, the temperature dependence of reaction kinetics (it's nonlinear which is incredibly important when you want one thing but not another), the thermal transfer characteristics of different materials and configurations, all sorts of stuff. The actual "doing" in cooking and baking is figuratively 95% chemistry (and 5% biology) even if the goal is different.
You don't see as much of that mindset in the mainstream of the layman but it's how all industrial processing is done. As an arbitrary example, given a process involving yeast you can construct time vs temp vs moisture vs salt curves to model its behavior.
You don't see as much of that mindset in the mainstream of the layman but it's how all industrial processing is done. As an arbitrary example, given a process involving yeast you can construct time vs temp vs moisture vs salt curves to model its behavior.