Modernist Cuisine

3 units

This course covers the science of modernist cuisine, the chemistry of cooking. Traditional cuisine is comprised of a standard canon of recipes and techniques. Modernist cuisine, on the other hand, uses non-traditional equipment, ingredients, procedures, and techniques to create unconventional food. Modernist cuisine uses some of the science involved in large scale industrial food production along with basic science to create novel food items. The course examines the basic properties of cooking utensil materials, physics of the design of utensils, basic properties of water, plant and animal materials, physics and chemistry of phase changes, emulsion and gel formation, sous vide, gels and food safety. This course is for non-science majors.