Inside the Experimental Cuisine Collective

Untitled

Robert Margolskee, Mitchell Davis, Florence Fabricant, Wylie Dufresne, and Hervé This at the Experimental Cuisine Collective’s launch workshop on April 11, 2007. Photo credit: Antoinette Bruno (Star Chefs)

 

Launched in 2007, the Experimental Cuisine Collective (ECC) has proven itself as an invaluable resource for those interested in learning about the scientific principles behind food. Founded by Drs. Kent Kirshenbaum and Amy Bentley of New York University in collaboration with Chef Will Goldfarb of WillPowder, the ECC hosts workshops approximately five times per year, each featuring different topics and/or speakers. ECC’s current Director is Anne McBride, a PhD candidate in Food Studies at NYU and Culinary Program/Editorial Director for the Culinary Institute of America. Widely recognized for her ability in establishing connections between scientists and chefs, McBride has been instrumental in developing ECC’s programs. ECC’s workshops have gained nationwide acclaim, featured in media outlets such as Serious Eats, New York Observer, and even the Food Network!

The impressive roster of past ECC speakers include renowned chefs and scientific minds such as Dan Barber, Wylie Dufresne, Rachel Dutton, and Mark Bomford. The topics of ECC workshops are also interestingly diverse, covering topics from soda politics with Marion Nestle to cooking insects with the Yale Sustainable Food Project to the New York Academy of Medicine’s Eating Through Time conference.

Our recent Science & Food public event featured Dr. Kent Kirshenbaum , who stopped to answer a few questions for us about the ECC:

What motivated you to start the Experimental Cuisine Collective?
I was asked by the National Science Foundation to consider establishing a science outreach program as part of their emphasis on “Broader Impacts” of scientific research. I’ve always been eager to establish connections between scientists and experts from other disciplines, so exploring the terrain between chemistry and cuisine came about very naturally.
What has been one of your most memorable experiences since founding the site?
The Experimental Cuisine Collective has always been more about direct engagement rather than as a web-based portal for information. One of my most memorable experiences with the ECC was preparing an alginate-based mango-juice pearl with a 4th grade student at a science fair.  I asked her if we were doing science or cooking. After a moment’s careful thought she replied, “I guess it’s both!” That was a very satisfying moment.

Another memorable experience was giving a lecture series about the ECC throughout New Zealand during the “International Year of Chemistry”. The director of the ECC, Anne McBride, and I got the chance to prepare what we believe were the world’s first vegan pavlovas for our audiences throughout New Zealand. We love Kiwis!

What do you hope the Experimental Cuisine Collective’s readers take away from the website?
I think they are excited about the lecture programs we are offering at NYU, and the opportunity to learn what science can contribute to cooking — along with how chefs can advance scientific objectives. Plus, I hope readers are quick to appreciate that we have been offering our programs for almost 10 years, and all of it has been completely free of charge!
Are there any upcoming projects you would like people to know about?
Our upcoming meeting will be devoted to hydroponic farming, in partnership with the Institute of Culinary Education. We will be meeting at ICE’s indoor 540-square-foot farm in lower Manhattan, designed by Boswyck Farms, which has 3,000 plant sites and in which 22 crops are currently growing. The amazing thing about this farm is that it is literally across the street from the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. Science can help us grow in so many ways and places!

Ashton YoonAbout the author: Ashton Yoon received her B.S. in Environmental Science at UCLA and is currently pursuing a graduate degree in food science. Her favorite pastime is experimenting in the kitchen with new recipes and cooking techniques.

Read more by Ashton Yoon


Science & Food UCLA 2016 Public Lecture Series

2016LineUp_New

The 2016 UCLA Science & Food public lecture series is here!

General admission tickets are available for $25 from the UCLA Central Ticket Office (CTO) . Tickets can be purchased from the UCLA CTO over the phone or in person and will not include additional fees or surcharges. The UCLA CTO is located on-campus and is open Monday–Friday, 10am –4pm. A UCLA CTO representative can be reached during these hours at 310-825-2101. Tickets can also be purchased online from Ticketmaster for $25 plus additional fees. A limited number of $5 student tickets are available to current UCLA students. These must be purchased in person at the UCLA CTO with a valid Bruin Card.


2016ImpactofWhatWeEat

The Impact of What We Eat: From Science & Technology, to Eating Local
Chef Daniel Patterson, Dr. Paul B. Thompson, & Dr. Kent Kirshenbaum

Tuesday, March 8, 2016 at 7:00pm
Schoenberg Hall, UCLA

 


2016Microbes

Microbes: From Your Food to Your Brain
Sandor Katz, Dr. Rachel Dutton, & Dr. Elaine Hsiao

Wednesday, May 11, 2016 at 7:00pm
Schoenberg Hall, UCLA

 


2016ZeroFoodprint

Curbing Carbon Emissions in Dining: A Conversation with Zero Foodprint
Chris Ying, Peter Freed, & Chef Anthony Myint

Thursday, May 19, 2016 at 7:00pm
Schoenberg Hall, UCLA

The Science of Pie 2014: Video Highlights

The Science of Pie 2014: Video Highlights

June 1, 2014

At the Science of Pie, the world’s first scientific bakeoff, the students of the Science & Food undergraduate course presented results from their final projects in poster format and their pies for taste testing. These pies had to be cooked in one hour and were the summation of all that the students had learned from their pie experiments in the class. Throughout the quarter, the students were challenged to perform a scientific investigation of apple pie and vary different features of the pie such as shape, butter size, and moisture.

The contest was judged by Lena Kwak (of Cup4Cup) and Dave Arnold (of Booker and Dax, the Museum of Food and Drink, and the Cooking Issues Podcast) who were our featured speakers for the 2014 Public Lecture Harnessing Creativity. They were joined by Nicole Rucker (Pastry Chef, Gjelina Take Away), Jonathan Gold (Food Critic, LA Times), Dr. Paul Barber (Associate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UCLA), and Dr. Rachelle Crosbie-Watson (Associate Professor of Integrative Biology and Physiology, UCLA).

The judges had wise words for the students.

Lena Kwak described how she judged the pies.

“With each of the projects we saw today, there were a considerable amount of variables not considered, but the saving grace …was when I tasted their pies.”

Nicole Rucker talked about what makes an award wining pie

“Jonathan and I both know that from Judging Pie Contests, … that you can see a good pie from literally across the room.”

Dr. Paul Barber spoke to the balance of science and pie making:

“No matter how much scientific testing you do, there’s still just this underlying art to making a really good pie.”

Check out some our featured pies from the 2014 contest.

Honorable Mention Pie

Alexis Cary & Matthew Copperman (Team On the Road)

Perfectly Unsoggy Apple Pie

Best Scientific Pie

Christina Cheung, Tori Schmitt, and Elliot Cheung (Team Pretty Intense Pie Enthusiasts)

Beer Crust Apple Pie

Best Overall Pie & People’s Choice Pie

Alina Naqvi & Ashley Lipkins-Scott (Team Apple Queens)

Crumbalicious Apple Pie

Check out our written recap here !

See the whole Video!

5 Things About Taste

At our 2014 public lecture How We Taste, Chef Wylie Dufresne, Dr. Dana Small, and Peter Meehan explored the tantalizingly complex concept of flavor. The evening was full of scientific discovery, childhood memories, and culinary innovation. In honor of this enlightening event, here are 5 things you might not know about our sense of taste:

Read more

Harnessing Creativity

Harnessing Creativity

Featuring Dave Arnold & Chef Lena Kwak

June 1, 2014

As part of our 2014 public lecture series, Dave Arnold (of Booker and Dax, the Museum of Food and Drink, and the Cooking Issues Podcast) discussed his latest culinary innovations and the role of creativity in food. He was joined by Chef Lena Kwak (of Cup4Cup) who shared her process of invention, research, and discovery in the kitchen.

Check out the highlights or watch the full lecture below.

Lena Kwak on the creation of Cup4Cup and the power of mistakes

“It was working with food that helped me get over the fear of imperfection. Making mistakes in the kitchen played a significant role in my recipe development. I found myself more daring [and] willing to experiment with different flavors and texture combinations…Take Cup4Cup. The original formula took me about year-and-a-half to finalize. A year-and-a-half is a very long time to make a lot of mistakes…. All the knowledge I gained through those mistakes has actually left me with [another] set of different products.”

Her biggest words of advice: “Go out there, makes mistakes—because you never know what those mistakes will lead you to.”

Dave Arnold on how to be creative in the kitchen

“What is important isn’t that you use a piece of technology or that you use a new piece of equipment. Really it’s that you try to understand what is going on while you’re cooking…. It’s to become unhinged in a very analytical way… that’s the whole premise of creativity.”

Dave Arnold uses gymnemic acid to flip our understanding of sweet foods

Dave Arnold gives the audience gymnemic acid to block their sweet taste receptors and then challenges them to try sweet treats like sugar, honey, strawberries and chocolate. He explains that erasing sweetness enables the taster to examine how other factors like texture and acidity influences the experience of sweet foods.

Arnold says this analytical approach to food is important: “Even if you have no idea why something happens, if you have a hypothesis … and you keep adapting and recording what your results are… you can get to the right place.”

Watch the entire lecture:

How We Taste

How We Taste

Featuring Dr. Dana Small, Chef Wylie Dufresne, & Peter Meehan

May 14, 2014 

As part of our 2014 public lecture series, we explored the concept of taste from the perspectives of a scientist, a chef, and a food writer. Dr. Dana Small described how our brains respond to flavors. Chef Wylie Dufresne of Wd~50 presented his creative approach to generating surprising food flavors and textures.  Peter Meehan shared his experiences with food and taste and how they have shaped his writing, both as a cookbook author and former writer for The New York Times.

Check out the highlights or watch the full lecture below

Wylie Dufresne on Science in the Kitchen and It’s Impact on WD~50

“Cooking is a lot of things and one of the things we discovered was that cooking is a science. There’s certainly some biology. There’s certainly some physics. There’s an awful lot of chemistry at play all the time when you’re cooking… One of the main reasons I opened up WD~50 … was to create a space where I could continue my culinary education, where my staff could continue their culinary education, and where you as a diner, if you so choose, could continue your culinary education.”

Wylie Dufresne on his Aerated Foie Gras 

“How could we, using some very modern technology, walk the idea of a mousse down the road? … Part of the problem with a mousse is that it usually has a lot of stuff in it besides the main ingredient… So what we wanted to do was to figure out if we could create a mousse of foie gras, or if we could aerate foie gras without adding or taking too much away from the flavor.”

Peter Meehan on Developing Taste and Eating Everything

“The first step in developing the taste to become a restaurant critic: Eat … I tried to just each everything… the more I ate the more I understood about food and the more I could draw connections about one thing and another… You start to make these mental points on a map of where flavors are in relation to each other.”

Dr. Dana Small Defines Taste

“There’s molecules and ions in the foods that we eat and they bind to cells on these elongated taste receptors [tastebuds]. When enough binds, the cells get excited. They send a signal to the brain that the brain then interprets as a taste … Taste evolved to detect the presence of nutrients and toxics … You’re born knowing that you like sweet and dislike bitter … because you don’t want to have to learn that sweet is energy and bitter is toxin.”

Dr. Dana Small Defines Flavor and How It’s Different from Taste

“Flavor, on the other hand, preferences and liking for flavors is entirely learned. This has the advantage of allowing us to learn to like available energy sources and learn to avoid particular food items … The flavor allows us to identify a particular item that was associated with a particular consequence that we need to remember… whereas the taste provides just a signal about whether an energy source as in the case of sweet is present.”

Watch the Entire Lecture

10 Things About Sushi

At our 2014 Science of Sushi event, Dr. Ole Mouritsen and Chef Morihiro Onodera illuminated the science underlying some of our favorite components of sushi. In case you still haven’t had your fill, here are 10 scientific facts related to sushi: Read more

The Science of Sushi

The Science of Sushi
Featuring Dr. Ole Mouritsen and Morihiro Onodera
April 23, 2014

To kick off our 2014 public lecture series, Dr. Ole Mouritsen joined Chef Morihiro Onodera to satisfy our craving for sushi-related science. The duo explained everything from sushi’s early history to the starchy science of sushi rice. Watch the entire lecture or check out some of the shorter highlights below.

Ole Mouritsen on the history of sushi

“The history of sushi is really the history of preservation of food. . . . Throughout Asia, in particular in China and later in Japan, people discovered that you can ferment fish – that is, you can preserve fish – by taking fresh fish and putting it in layers of cooked rice. . . . After some time the fish changes texture, it changes taste, it changes odor, but it’s still edible and it’s nutritious. And maybe after half a year you could then pull out the fish and eat the fish. That is the original sushi.”

Ole Mouritsen on the science of rice

“If you look inside the rice, you have little [starch] granules that are only three to eight microns, or three t0 eight thousandths of a millimeter, big. . . . When you cook the rice, you add some water and the water is absorbed by the rice and [the granules] swell. And the real secret behind the sushi rice is that when they swell, these little grains are not supposed to break.”

Morihiro Onodera on examining the quality of sushi rice

“First what I do is I soak uncooked rice in water. . . . Sometime after 20 minutes it will start to break. . . . I take a sample to check to see if there are any cracks. . . . With good rice, which has less cracks or breaks, you’re able to feel the texture of each of the grains in your mouth, whereas with the lower quality rice you’re just going to get the stickiness [from the starch].”

Harnessing Creativity & The Science of Pie (Event Recap)

On your mark…
Get set…
GO!

As the doors swung open, guests eagerly awaiting the final Science & Food lecture series were transported to a place nothing short of a Pie-Palooza. Twenty student teams stood confidently next to their baked confection and explained to the judges how they employed the scientific method to creatively reimagine the art of baking the perfect pie. Some developed aqueous solutions to modify the flakiness of their pie crusts while others sought to improve filling texture by altering pH levels and used techniques such as microscopy to measure their results. Whatever their approach, the students proved that a little bit of science goes a long way in mastering the craft of pie baking.

Dr. Paul Barber (Associate Professor, UCLA) and Dave Arnold carefully evaluate the students pie presentations

Dr. Paul Barber (Associate Professor, UCLA) and Dave Arnold carefully evaluate the student pie presentations

Special guest judges, Nicole Rucker of Gjelina Take Away and food critic, Jonathan Gold

Nicole Rucker (Pastry Chef, Gjelina Take Away) and Jonathan Gold (Food Critic, LA Times) partner up as special guest judges


Lena Kwak and Dr. Rachelle Crosbie-Watson (Associate Professor, UCLA) take a closer look at student posters

Lena Kwak and Dr. Rachelle Crosbie-Watson (Associate Professor, UCLA) take a closer look at student posters

After the large-scale pie tasting, guest speakers, Lena Kwak and Dave Arnold, took the stage to share their insight on innovation in the culinary laboratory and emphasized how unforeseen mishaps often lead to novel discoveries. Co-Founder and President of Cup4Cup, Kwak discussed how her breakthrough formulation of gluten-free flour was a by-product of her fearlessness to try new techniques and make mistakes in the kitchen. Founder of the Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD) and Owner of Booker & Dax, Arnold described how curiosity and relentless dedication to experimentation led to the development of many of his out-of-the-box culinary gadgets. Case in point: the Searzall, one of his latest inventions designed for hand-held blowtorches to evenly apply high temperature heat to sear foods while avoiding the remnants of unpleasant aromatics. He also invoked the audience to participate in an experiment where he challenged everyone to digest gymnemic acid, which dulls our sensory perception of sweetness. This exercise was designed to help guests unlock and appreciate the other factors (such as texture) that contribute to our understanding of taste.

Kwak addresses the audience's questions and reveals some of ingredients in her gluten-free flour

Kwak addresses the audience’s questions and reveals some of ingredients in her gluten-free flour


Dave Arnold explains his investigative process to developing his newest product, Searzall

Arnold explains and demonstrates the evolutionary process involved in developing the Searzall


Gymnemic acid, a sweetness inhibitor, made this bag of sweets taste completely bland!

Gymnemic acid, a sweetness inhibitor, made this bag of sweets taste completely bland

Finally, the panel of special guest judges shared with the audience their favorite pies from the student entries and awarded the students with prizes for the “Most Creative Pie”, “Most Qualified to Enter a Real Pie Contest”, “Best Scientific Pie”, “The People’s Choice Pie”, and “Best Overall Pie”.

Tom Folker and Eric Hirshfield-Yamanishi take home the "Most Qualified to Enter a Real Pie Contest" prize

Tom Folker and Eric Hirshfield-Yamanishi take home the “Most Qualified to Enter a Real Pie Contest” prize

Folker and Hirshfield-Yamanishi explored the effect alcohol, specifically Fireball whiskey, had on the overall flakiness of their pie crust and produced a pie the judges thought was worthy of a professional pie contest.

The "Most Creative Pie" went to Ying Zhi Lim and Jen So for their rosemary-infused deconstructed apple pie

The “Most Creative Pie” went to Ying Zhi Lim and Jen So for their imaginative apple pie

These creative young women, Lim and So, took the competition to the next level by presenting a deconstructed, rosemary-infused apple pie topped with a “reverse spherified” lemon zest cream cheese sauce to a create a harmoniously balanced and flavorful treat.

Christina Chung, Tori Schmitt, and Elliot Cheung impressed the judges and won the "Best Scientific Pie" award

Christina Chung, Tori Schmitt, and Elliot Cheung impressed the judges and won the “Best Scientific Pie” award

Chung, Schmitt, and Cheung added different combinations of liquids to generate their pie crust and recorded the amount of force required to alter the elasticity of the baked crust. Ultimately, the incorporation of beer into their pie crust recipe significantly altered texture as measured and quantified by the elastic modulus.

Apple Queens, Alina Naqvi and Ashley Upkins-Scott, stole the show and won both "The People's Choice Pie" and  "Best Overall Pie" prize

Apple Queens, Alina Naqvi and Ashley Upkins-Scott, stole the show and won both “The People’s Choice Pie” and “Best Overall Pie” prize

Naqvi and Upkins-Scott of team Apple Queens took different varieties of apples, including Granny Smith, Red Delicious, Pink Lady, and Fiji, to produce a crumble top pie that garnered praise from both the audience and the judges.

Congratulations to all the winners!

All photos were captured by Patrick Tran. For more images from the event, visit this photo album.


Anthony MartinAbout the author: Anthony Martin received his Ph.D. in Genetic, Cellular and Molecular Biology at USC and is self-publishing a cookbook of his favorite Filipino dishes.

Read more by Anthony Martin


5 Things About Apples

Our third and final lecture, Harnessing Creativity (and the Science of Pie), is coming up fast! At the event, students from the Science & Food undergraduate course will be serving up science and apple pies. To get ready, here are 5 fun facts related to apples:

Apples3


Apples5


Apples1


Apples2


Apples4


Liz Roth-JohnsonAbout the author: Liz Roth-Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate in Molecular Biology at UCLA. If she’s not in the lab, you can usually find her experimenting in the kitchen.

Read more by Liz Roth-Johnson