MICHAEL BRENNER: Hi, I'm Michael Brenner.
PIA SORENSEN: I'm Pia Sorensen.
DAVE WEITZ: I'm Dave Weitz.
MICHAEL BRENNER: I'm an applied mathematician.
PIA SORENSEN: And I'm a chemist.
DAVE WEITZ: I'm a physicist.
MICHAEL BRENNER: But we're all here to teach
a class on the science of cooking.
PIA SORENSEN: So this course was originally developed as a way
to teach science to non-science majors at Harvard University.
MICHAEL BRENNER: Harvard has this idea that every student, whether they
see themselves as a scientist or not, must study some science as part
of their education.
And so the idea with creating courses like this
is that they're supposed to connect what students
learn in a classroom at Harvard with what happens in real life
beyond Harvard.
DAVE WEITZ: And what could be more common in real life than cooking?
PIA SORENSEN: As a way to do this, we're now
going to use food as a way to explain the underlying scientific principles
that are all around us when we interact with food,
or we eat, or we go to a restaurant, and so on.
MICHAEL BRENNER: We're going to do this not only in the context of recipes
that you cook in your very own kitchen--
PIA SORENSEN: You're also going to be watching amazing dishes being
created by world famous chefs.
And you're going to learn to understand the underlying scientific principles.
DAVE WEITZ: And sometimes they work, but not always.
But we'll understand both when they work and when
they don't work from the scientific principles behind them.
PIA SORENSEN: And as a way to cap all of this of,
we will then send you into your kitchen where you will do your own experiments.
You'll take measurements and make observations.
And you will then get to eat your lab.
And so as a way of going through this process,
you will learn to think like a scientist.
MICHAEL BRENNER: Because in the end, science and cooking
are subjects that are very related to each other.
They're both fundamentally experimental subjects in which one experiments
to try to understand when things work and when they don't work.
PIA SORENSEN: So each week, we're going to visit the kitchen of a famous chef.
And we're then going to use their creations as a way
to inspire our scientific explorations that underlies
their dishes and their cooking.
Each week, we're going to have a lab where
you explore the scientific principles that are specific for that week.
And if you don't have access to the particular ingredients in your region,
then we invite you to go out and find the ingredients
that you're used to working with that can also
explore these scientific principles.
And then we invite you to share these recipes with all of us.
Each week, there's going to be homework where
we try to join the scientific principle with aspects of cooking.
So this class has no exams.
We're just going to use the homework in the lab
as a way to see if you're following along.
In addition to the chef that we're visiting each week,
we're also going to be visited by Harold McGee, Nathan Myhrvold, and America's
Test Kitchen in many of the weeks.
And they're going to give us their very unique perspective
on the topic of the week.
At the end of the course, you're going to spend some weeks
of working on your own final projects.
So we're going to ask you to pick a topic, a culinary topic that really
interests you.
And you're then going to make your own experiments in your kitchen
and try to figure out an underlying scientific principle
in that dish or that recipe.
And you're then going to share what you found in your final project with people
from all over the world.
MICHAEL BRENNER: What is particularly remarkable about the chefs
that we will visit is that their dishes are, on one hand,
spectacular, culinary dishes, and on the other hand,
they are nearly perfect pedagogical illustrations
of the scientific principles behind everyday cooking.
And it is this parallel that will provide
the intellectual basis of our course.
OK.
So let's get started.