Welcome to FST425 – Food Systems Chemistry – The Science of Deliciousness.
“… it's pretty rare to find a chemist who can produce anything even remotely edible in the kitchen”
Royal Society of Chemistry “Chemistry World” 2006
Yeah, right !
Baker, surfer, & cooking chemist, Oregon State University, 2009
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But you might want to consider this statement.
"I think it is a sad reflection on our civilization,
that while we can and do measure the temperature in the atmosphere of Venus
we do not know what goes on inside our soufflés."
Nicholas Kurti
The world’s first “food physicist”, 1969.
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Knowing the subtlies of soufflés is just one reason for studying a Science of Deliciousness? For me as a food science professional, or simply in my roles as a family cook or community baker, the other reasons are summarized in my desire, at the smallest and largest scales, to be able to reproducibly create my favorite dish, or bread, or beverage. I hope that you share that desire with enough passion to start on the path to becoming familiar, or even expert, at the underlying chemistry.
The problem we have is that so far the chemistry you have learned has been in little boxes: inorganic, organic, bio, and there are even more boxes for physical, surface, & polymer chemistry. Even the introductory food chem you've just completed had its own little boxes for carbs, lipids, and proteins. My view is that the little boxes mask the complexity: the real world is messy, and others agree.
“One life’s simple pleasures is really quite complicated…”
“Without a deep understanding of how the vagaries of bean production, roasting and preparation
minutely affect the hundreds of compounds that define coffee’s flavor, aroma and body,
a quality cup would be an infrequent and random occurrence”.
Ernesto Illy, late chairman of Illycaffè
“The Complexity of Coffee” Scientific American June 2002
Foods are complex multi-component systems where many phenomena interact to produce both familiar, and sometimes new and unfamiliar, tastes, textures, aromas, and appearances. We are at the fascinating juncture of all of these branches of chemistry. As cooks and chemists we take biological materials and subject them to very harsh conditions like very high or very low temperatures, we add extra moisture or dry them out, we change the acidity or alkalinity, we add prodigious quantities of sugar or salt for preservation, or we add microbes and ferment them, and we often store them for long periods of time. We have a common quest for deliciousness that we embark upon each time we select our raw materials, or prepare, cook, or consume foods.
This course is designed to help us address foods as integrated wholes and to see how our manipulations, or often subtle differences in raw materials, affect the outcomes. I've created lab sessions with the aim of providing a vivid way for you to manipulate real foods, no test tubes, to see how the outcomes change. The labs are in a food grade facility, so we will often be able to eat or drink the result, which is a lot of fun. The trade-off is that you will need to think deeply about the system to be able to interpret and explain the chemistry of many of these transformations. For instance, the almost magical transformation from dough to bread in the oven. But, we're scientists and we don't beleive in magic - do we?
These questions are among the things we will address.
-Why does bread crust turn brown in the oven when the crumb doesn’t?
-Why does my espresso shot have no crema when I make it from really dark roasted beans?
-Why does the head on my beer disappear faster if I am eating potato chips?
-What’s happening with the molecules that let jello, which is 98% water, bounce like a rubber ball? This video is evocative of our quest to understand why. bouncing jello in ultra slo-mo
-Why does pectin need so much sugar to gel when we make jams and jellies?
So these questions and the others we'll address really constitute a quest – A quest to get “a deep understanding of food raw materials and processing [cooking], so we know how to control the compounds that create the flavors, aromas, textures, and appearances of foods, so that in the end we can produce high quality products that are frequent and methodical occurrences” (Adapted from Ernesto Illy)
The trajectory of the course
The course content addresses our quest firstly by looking at foods as materials…
-that are mixtures with dissimilar parts and structures,
-that are changeable in time,
-and that are responsive to external forces [chewing comes to mind].
The preparatory sessions will include introductory work, unavoidably still in little boxes. Introductory topics include food polymer fundamentals, starch chemistry, physical chemistry of gel formation, and the science of deformation [rheology]. These preparatory sessions will set you up to appreciate and exploit the latter part of the term where we take farm-to-fork views of selected foods, integrating the various chemistries to see how they interact to create, with us, the final & delicious outcomes. Where possible, elements of “molecular gastronomy” and “science-based cooking” are woven into the course fabric as a way of bringing vibrancy, further context, and some fun. At this point in the term we know that we’ll do case studies on bread – from field to filone – and on coffee – bean to brew. There are other options for the other 2 case studies that we’ll have time for.
The “living course” component of FST425 is there to allow you to help enrich our collective experience with your own input. The material you collect will be moderated, but is designed to enrich the course now and into the future, and to reveal new and exiting perspectives on all aspects of foods, their preparation, and the complex and beautiful chemistry that underpins it all. This component of the course is also there to help you develop the skills and lateral thinking abilities that will enable you to successfully search web resources or academic databases and reliably find credible and relevant resources. These skills will be important to you as professional food scientists.
Don’t limit your imagination. James Prescott Joule, who created the experiment that revealed the equivalence between mechanical and thermal energy, was a brewer.