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Gen Ed course brings together famed chefs and eminent academics
Collaboration by Alícia, chef Ferran Adrià’s foundation, and the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences aims to inspire students and advance kitchen science
Cambridge, Mass. - March 23, 2010 - A collaboration by the Foundation Alícia (Alimentació i Ciència), headed by internationally acclaimed chef Ferran Adrià of El Bulli fame, and the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has led to the creation of a new undergraduate course on science and cooking.
Debuting in the fall of 2010, “Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter,” will be part of the new program in General Education at Harvard College. The course will bring together eminent Harvard researchers and world-class chefs, including Wylie Dufresne of wd-50 and Dan Barber of Blue Hill, as well as food scholar and writer Harold McGee, one of the leading authorities on kitchen science.
“Cooking provides an ideal framework to study a variety of complex phenomena—from basic chemistry to materials science to applied physics—through something familiar to all students: food,” says one of the Harvard course organizers, David A. Weitz, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics in SEAS and the Department of Physics at Harvard. “In fact, much of what we do in the lab is what chefs like Ferran Adrià are now doing in their kitchens.”
Adrià is considered a pioneer of exploiting scientific principles to push the limits of modern cuisine, manipulating the physical and chemical processes of cooking by using substances such as hydrocolloids, or “gums” that enable a delicate fruit puree to be transformed into a dense gel, and deconstruction techniques like spherification, creating a resistant skin of liquid (as in a pea soup held in a pod of nothing more than itself).
“The course at Harvard represents one of the greatest aspirations for cooks all over the world,” says Adrià. “It is a unprecedented privilege that cooks will be able to explain how they cook in an academic setting and learn from Harvard faculty and students. I believe this course will be instrumental in fostering and energizing the relation between science and cooking.”
In addition to Weitz and Adrià, the team behind the class includes José Andrés, an innovative Spanish chef with restaurants in Washington D.C. and Los Angeles; Michael Brenner, Glover Professor of Applied Mathematics and Applied Physics in SEAS; and two postdoctoral researchers in SEAS, Amy Rowat (who has written and lectured on science and food) and Otger Campàs (who has worked alongside Adrià in the kitchen).
Twelve world-class chefs and food experts, noted for both their culinary and communication abilities, have been invited to participate in the course. Each guest speaker will give a lecture on cooking that will then provide the basis for a parallel lecture on the underlying science given by the Harvard researchers. In addition, enrolled students will participate in a demonstration “cooking lab” designed to illustrate the techniques up-close.
The invited lecturers will also collaborate with the faculty organizers to deliver an ancillary lecture, focused on the artistry of gastronomy with the science of food, to the broader Harvard community. Finally, the chef-faculty team expects to create a rigorous textbook that will provide a reference for both cooks and scientists alike.
“The creations by the chefs will be the inspiration for introductory, but demanding, classes on soft matter science, covering topics ranging from foams and emulsions, to gelation and polymer melts, among many others,” explains Weitz. “By bringing chefs into the classroom, students will have an amazing opportunity to learn from some of the most creative and innovative professionals in the world today.”
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