Science and Cooking: A Dialogue- Lecture 1- Harold McGee, Ferran Adria, José Andrés

Speakers: Harold McGee, Ferran Adria (elBulli), José Andrés (minibar by josé andrés, Jaleo, The Bazaar) with commentary/moderation from Professors David Weitz and Michael Brenner (Harvard) 

This public lecture series discusses concepts from the physical sciences that underpin both everyday cooking and haute cuisine. Each lecture features a world-class chef who visited and presented their remarkable culinary designs: Ferran Adria presented spherification; Jose Andres discussed both the basic components of food and gelation; Joan Roca demonstrated sous vide; Enric Rovira showed his chocolate delicacies; Wylie Dufresne presented inventions with transglutaminase. The lectures then use these culinary creations as inspiration to delve into understanding how and why cooking techniques and recipes work, focusing on the physical transformations of foods and material properties.

Watch Next Video: Sous-vide Cooking: a State of Matter- Lecture 2- Joan Roca

Who is Harold McGee?

Harold McGee is an American author who writes about the chemistry, technique and history of food and cooking and has written two seminal books on kitchen science. His first book, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen was initially published in 1984. A greatly revised second edition was published in 2004.

McGee has also written for Nature, Health, The New York Times, the World Book Encyclopedia, The Art of Eating, Food & Wine, Fine Cooking, and Physics Today and lectured on kitchen chemistry at cooking schools, universities, The Oxford Symposia on Food, the Denver Natural History Museum and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

McGee also consults for restaurants and manufacturers. Currently, he writes a regular column for the New York Times, The Curious Cook, which examines, and often debunks, conventional kitchen wisdom. Along with Dave Arnold and Nils Norén, he also teaches a three-day class at The French Culinary Institute in New York City entitled the Harold McGee Lecture Series.

Education

Before becoming a food science writer McGee was a literature and writing instructor at Yale. He attended the California Institute of Technology, originally intending to study Astronomy and Physics, but graduated with a B.S in Literature (1973), and later went on to receive a Ph.D from Yale University.

Influence

McGee's science-based approach to cooking has been embraced and popularized by chefs and authors such as Heston Blumenthal, Alton Brown, Shirley Corriher, Lynne Rossetto Kasper and Russ Parsons.

Harold McGee tastes surstromming (Swedish fermented herring) at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, 2010

Books

1. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (ISBN 0-684-80001-2, 2004)

2. The Curious Cook: More Kitchen Science and Lore (ISBN 0-02-009801-4, 1990)

3. Keys to Good Cooking: A Guide to Making the Best of Foods and Recipes (ISBN 0-34-096320-4, 2010), a compendium of practical information on food and cooking.