Harold McGee on the History of Science and Cooking I

This is an introduction of how the science and a technical approach have been presented in the
kitchen for centuries. Harold McGee shows some examples about different remarkable pioneers
and characters in the Science and Cooking and how they contributed in the development of the
current ways of cooking that we know so far.

Harold McGee on the History of Science and Cooking II

In this second part, Harold skips to the last 30 years and shows and overview of what we know as a
modern cuisine of pre-Ferran. He starts pointing out what are the more significant fundamentals
followed in the professional cuisine: harmony and creativity. The second part of the video explain
through some examples how some icons of professional cuisine took the concepts mentioned
before the led the food preparation to the next level. Finally, we can see some iconic plates like
Garguilllou, Monlten Chocolate Cake among other fine desserts.

Why equations? 04th November

In this video is explained the relevance of equations to understand all the phenomena that occurs
while cooking. Even though it does not seem to be a direct correlation between cooking and
equations the instructor points out how formulas are tools that are useful for us in many ways.
First, the help us to get a clear picture about what is going in our preparations, second, they
support our qualitative insights about cooking and finally, expressing a process in mathematical
terms, aims to make predictions about the behavior of materials and conditions in the kitchen.

Food is Made of Molecules: Fats, Carbohydrates and Proteins (05 th November)

This video is about what are the main components of food, namely, Fats, Carbohydrates and
Proteins. Firstly, there is a brief introduction about what are the fundamental units that food and
matter in general is made of, atoms and molecules. The rest of the video bases on expose and
define the most important constituent polymers of food, which are fats, carbs and protein. All
their characteristics in conformation, shape and behavior are depicted along with the properties
that distinguish from each other.

How many molecules are there? (12th November)

This explanatory video introduces the unit to quantify the large number of atoms and molecules
that are contained in a hunk of stuff. After some definitions and mathematical calculations, the
unit is defined as a mole and represents the numbers of atoms that contains 12 grams of carbon. It
is pointed out that this unit will be used repeatedly during this course.
Dimensional Analysis (22nd November)

This video covers how to deal with the dimensional analysis while performing any calculation in
order to make sure you get a right answer. The Professor Pia Sörensen gives three important
recommendations to remember. The first is to learn the prefixes commonly used like kilo, centi,
micro, etc. The second is to convert all the units to standard units in order to avoid mistakes and
the third is to operates with the fundamental units instead of specially named units, as are Pascal
or Newton. At the end of the video she shows some examples of algebraic calculations.

Flavor (17th November)

In this video is explained what flavor is, and how it works. Flavor can be defined as the overall
experience that you have in your senses as you eat a piece of food. There are other concepts like
taste or aroma which comes when we talk about flavor. The scientific explanation behind the
flavor is related to the molecules in food and how they interact with our tongue and the nerve
receptors on it. These incomes are sent on the brain which, in turn, translates them into a specific
and individual experience of flavor.