Gen Ed course brings together famed chefs and eminent academics

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).