If you ever doubt that we are living in a golden age of science, José Andrés tells his audience of university students, consider the case of thickening agents and strawberry mousse.
“All of a sudden the gel of the strawberries is not just 50-percent flavorful,” Mr. Andrés declaims in a hammy public-television voice. “It’s 100-percent flavorful. And this is a big breakthrough. It’s a huge breakthrough.”
Then he cues a video, and the 300 students taking the Harvard University course “Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft-Matter Science” break into applause. Mr. Andrés, who owns several restaurants in and around Washington, D.C., and appears regularly on television food shows, is just one of several famous chefs who give guest lectures in the course, which began this fall. Students here—most of whom are not science majors—learn equations for viscosity, elasticity, and diffusion, and they can eat their homework.
The two people who have been the backbone of the course are not celebrities, however. Otger Campàs and Amy C. Rowat are postdoctoral fellows doing research in physics. Officially, their appointments at Harvard don’t carry any teaching duties. If they spent 90 hours a week in their laboratories and never spoke to anyone younger than 23, no one would mind. But they somehow stumbled into the creation of a hugely popular undergraduate course.
The course began, in a sense, with one postdoc’s yearning for an interesting dinner.
Mr. Campàs came to Harvard in 2007, not long after completing a doctorate in biophysics at the University of Barcelona and the Curie Institute, in Paris. For his dissertation, he had studied the molecular forces that underlie three types of intracellular movement, including the complex dance that chromosomes perform when cells divide.
But while he had thrived in Barcelona’s physics department, Mr. Campàs was no more successful than most people when he tried to score a table at El Bulli, the Catalan restaurant that is the world’s best-known temple of molecular gastronomy.
El Bulli’s head chef, Ferran Adrià, has pioneered such exotic techniques as the “spherification” of juices and other liquids. In spherification, the liquid is combined with a small amount of gelling agent and then submerged in a solution of calcium chloride. The result, when it works, is a small round ball with a stable crispy exterior and a liquid interior. (Mr. Andrés worked at the restaurant early in his career.)
El Bulli has a famously brutal reservation system: Hundreds of thousands of people apply, but only 8,000 win seats in the restaurant’s annual lottery. Mr. Campàs tried his luck multiple times while he was studying at Barcelona, but never succeeded.
One day in 2008, a year after he arrived at Harvard, Mr. Campàs overheard faculty members talking about whom to invite to deliver an annual popular-science lecture. He had a flash: Maybe Ferran Adrià would want to visit Harvard. Maybe he’d even do a cooking demonstration. If Mr. Campàs couldn’t get a table at El Bulli, maybe he could find some other way to get Mr. Adrià to cook for him.
“My background is in soft-matter physics,” Mr. Campàs says, “which is essentially the study of emulsions, polymer networks—all the things that we see when we cook. So I thought that it would be good to bring Ferran Adrià here and show the department how intimately involved those two topics are.”
Mr. Campàs wrote an e-mail in Catalan to Mr. Adrià, not especially hopeful of a reply. But a few days later, Mr. Adrià said yes. In December 2008, he flew to Harvard and gave a public lecture before several hundred people.
After the lecture, Mr. Campàs and one of his Harvard mentors—Michael P. Brenner, a professor of applied mathematics and physics—talked casually with Mr. Adrià about the possibility of developing a science-of-cooking course. But the proposal might have evaporated if not for the intervention of a second applied-physics professor, David A. Weitz.
“Dave realized very quickly that if we just said, ‘Oh, yeah, nice idea, let’s be in touch,’ that it would probably never happen,” Mr. Campàs recalls. “He said, Let’s put this in writing right now.” Before Mr. Adrià left campus that day, he was persuaded to sign a memorandum of understanding: His culinary institute, the Alicia Foundation, would financially support a science-of-cooking course at Harvard.
Food as a Lure
With that commitment in place, Mr. Brenner and Mr. Weitz had to decide what kind of course to create: An upper-level course for physics and biology majors? Or something for a broader range of students?
It so happened that Mr. Brenner was serving then on a committee charged with redesigning Harvard’s general-education program. And it so happened that within a week of Mr. Adrià's visit, that committee put out a call to science departments to propose new kinds of courses that would engage nonscience majors.
“There was a lucky confluence of events,” Mr. Brenner says. But even so, he adds, he and Mr. Weitz had to think carefully about whether a general-education course would actually work.
“A course for science majors would be much easier to teach,” Mr. Brenner says. “I teach upper-level math classes. Communicating with nonscience majors is not something I normally do.” Constructing a course for nonscience students—and making sure that the homework and lab assignments are neither too hard nor too easy for the typical student—would be an enormous challenge, they realized.
In the end, the idea of using food as a lure for a large gen-ed course proved irresistible. But then Mr. Brenner and Mr. Weitz had to confront a second dilemma: They barely cook. And their knowledge of Mr. Adrià's universe of avant-garde cuisine was hazy at best.
To help them through that minefield, they had Mr. Campàs. And they also turned to Amy Rowat, a postdoc in Mr. Weitz’s laboratory who may know more than anyone else at Harvard about the science of cooking.
Ms. Rowat earned her doctorate in physics at the University of Southern Denmark, where her adviser was Ole G. Mouritsen, a scholar with a longstanding interest in culinary science. (He has published a monograph on sushi.)
In 2004, Ms. Rowat, Mr. Mouritsen, and several Danish colleagues created the Gastrophysical Society, which was initially “an excuse to eat different foods and talk about science,” Ms. Rowat recalls. “But then we started to do some experiments in the lab, studying the surface tension of whiskey, things like that.”
Ms. Rowat’s primary lines of research have nothing directly to do with food: She is interested in the physical dynamics of cell membranes. And she and others in Mr. Weitz’s laboratory have invented new techniques for isolating individual yeast cells—a process that should make it easier to study variations in gene expression across multiple generations of an organism.
But Ms. Rowat has also been a passionate cook for many years. In an essay in Science in 2006, she explained where to find good Corsican cheese. She has exotic gelling agents in her kitchen. In late 2007, a year before Mr. Adrià's visit, she gave a public lecture at Harvard on the science of pizza.
So it was natural for Mr. Brenner and Mr. Weitz to turn to her to get the new course on its feet. Ms. Rowat and Mr. Campàs spent the first part of 2010 searching for an appropriate laboratory. (They ultimately found a lab that had never been used at all, which meant that it could easily be declared food-safe by Harvard authorities.) They ordered equipment for the lab and, working with a team of 14 graduate teaching assistants, designed the basic assignments.
“Without Amy and Otger, all of this would have been impossible,” Mr. Brenner says. “As of May, we had nothing. No syllabus, no facilities. They made it happen.”
Using Their Noodles
Ms. Rowat will leave Harvard in January for a tenure-track position at the University of California at Los Angeles. She plans to create a similar course there before long, and she does not expect to have any trouble recruiting West Coast chefs to serve as lecturers.
“What we’ve found here is that chefs are just so desperate to have contact with scientists,” she says. “In some cases, they have cooking problems that they don’t know how to solve. In other cases, they’re just curious to know why something happens the way it does.”
On December 7, the students in the Harvard course will hold a science fair at which they will display their final projects. The judges will include Harvard scientists and several of the chefs who have served as guest lecturers. The winning three-student team will be invited to Spain to visit the headquarters of the Alicia Foundation.
Since they learned about the prize, in mid-October, the students “have taken all of their efforts here to another level,” Ms. Rowat says.
Several of the student teams are working on projects requested by the chefs, according to Naveen Sinha, a graduate student in applied physics who is the course’s lead teaching assistant. “They’re working on new kinds of gluten-free pasta, or new kinds of sorbet, or creating noodles out of Parmesan cheese,” Mr. Sinha says.
As for Mr. Campàs, he did finally make his way into the temple. As part of the memorandum of understanding, Mr. Adrià has invited Mr. Campàs and other Harvard scientists to assist him with new dishes.
“Ferran asked me about one problem that I didn’t know how to solve,” Mr. Campàs says. “I’ve included it in the project list for the students in the class. We’ll see if some of them come up with an idea. What Ferran wants is to create warm ice cream. You want the same texture as ice cream, and you want it to melt in your mouth, but you want it warm.”
A golden age of science, indeed.