Science of Food & Cooking

Catalog description

What is the real shape of your food? How do you define cooking on a molecular sense? Are all calories the same? Is industrial food really as diverse as it seems? The ever-rising wave of general interest in food has helped to knock down the barriers of science and cooking, where science found its way into house-kitchen and cooking into laboratories and industrial plants in the past three decades. This course attempts to integrate some of the broad questions, as the ones given above, by taking food as a molecular architecture and its preparation as a hypothesis-driven scientific event. The answers to these questions would touch upon matters of health, nutrition, environment and ethics of eating. The laboratory sessions would complement the in-class topics by providing hands-on activities on elucidating the science of cooking, preparation of chemical cuisines and quantitative/qualitative analysis of food components in commercial food and drinks.