Science and Cooking Research Group
Harvard courses
Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft
How can we use scientific principles to make better food, for ourselves and for the world?
This course discusses concepts from the physical sciences that underpin both everyday cooking and haute cuisine. The content, including the delicious and edible (!) labs, have been developed in collaboration with the El Bulli Foundation in Spain. Each week a world-class chef visits and present their remarkable culinary designs. Inspired by this, the course then explores scientific topics ranging from energy, diffusion, and heat transfer, to emulsions, foams, and viscosity.
Students spend the last five weeks of the course working on a practical project connecting some aspect of cooking to science. The results are presented at the course-wide science fair. At the end of the course, students are able to explain how a range of cooking techniques and recipes work, in terms of the physical and chemical transformations of the food.
The visiting speakers rotate; they have included: Ferran Adria (El Bulli Foundation), Harold McGee (On Food and Cooking), José Andrés (minibar, Jaleo, ThinkFoodGroup), Joanne Chang (Flour Bakery, Myers and Chang), and many, many others.
Flavor Molecules of Food Fermentation: Exploration and Inquiry
Microorganisms produce a diverse array of specialized small molecules as part of their metabolic processes. In this course we study the production, properties, and characterization of these molecules through the lens of food fermentation. In particular, we focus on the small molecules that contribute taste and aroma in fermented foods. Students experience the scientific inquiry process in a creative way by designing and implementing their own research project based on a fermented food of their choosing.
The ultimate goal of this class is to guide students in conducting a successful research project, successful meaning a project that is substantive, original, and addressing a question whose answer would make a genuine contribution to knowledge about flavor molecules and fermentation.
Our approach is to start the semester with a deep-dive into the field: we try our hands at various fermentation processes, explore the literature, engage with visiting speakers, and make a small number of local field trips. Throughout we engage with the material by asking questions and exploring potential research projects. We then spend the second half of the semester working on the projects, while sharing and collectively discussing our findings. This course is in many ways a mini-version of the scientific process: from a cursory interest in a field, to tangible data and communication and publication of results.
Physics E-27
Science and Cooking, hybrid or online
Harvard Extension School
This course is based on the on-campus version of Science and Cooking and offers an opportunity for non-harvard college students to take the course for credit through Harvard Extension School. The course involves considerably more human interaction and personalized feedback than the Harvard X course. Students watch online videos, complete problem sets, and perform lab exercises in their kitchens, all while being connected to the course staff and classmates through the online discussion forum and web conferencing. Alternatively, the hybrid version combines weekly online lectures with on-campus activities. The course concludes with students working on a final project of their choosing and presenting it to the class at the online science fair.
Engineering Sciences 91r
Supervised Reading and Research
Harvard College
This course offers students the opportunity to work on an individual research project under the supervision of a faculty member. Alumni of Science and Cooking who want to continue working on their final project can sign up for this course to do so for credit. Students can also explore a new topic. Past projects have ranged from optimizing the performance of kitchen appliances, to chocolate tempering, vegan ice cream substitutes, and Japanese candy.