Culinary All-Stars Go To Harvard -- To Teach Physics

Come this fall, Harvard students will be able to study with some of the world's most acclaimed chefs.

But they won't be perfecting the art of cooking a succulent roast or fashioning a flaky pie crust, exactly. Rather, chefs Ferran Adria -- of El Bulli fame -- and Jose Andres will be schooling students in culinary physics.

The Washington Post reports:

Over 13 weeks, Andres and Adria will teach multiple times, while such renowned chefs as Blue Hill's Dan Barber and another Michelin-starred chef from Spain, Joan Roca, will appear once. Students will attend chef demonstrations, physics lectures and labs that explain the structure and characteristics of a classic emulsion (a liquid dispersed into another liquid) and more recent inventions such as Adria's famous foams (air bubbles surrounded by thin sheets of fluid).

With a greater understanding of the physical parameters of food, students will learn how to manipulate them. Ditto for the chefs. Much of the culinary invention in recent decades has been a result of trial and error rather than scientific research. Adria is reported to have invented the foam after a friend gave him a canister of nitrous oxide with which to experiment.

No stranger to Harvard, Adria captivated the school during a 2008 lecture. According to Time:

The crowd exhaled collective "aaaahs" as if they could almost taste the bejeweled concoctions being assembled on video before them -- perfect little caviar-like spheres made of melon essence, translucent ravioli, a caipirinha sorbet. These innovations, he explained, were part of his new vocabulary of eating, opening new ways of communicating through food.

Adria recently announced he was shuttering El Bulli to start a culinary academy.