Culinary Physics
ITP's Culinary Physics class with Stefani Bardin was written up in NYU News:
In ITP professor Stefani Bardin’s Culinary Physics class, looks may be deceiving. In one modernist cuisine exercise, what appears to be an egg is actually mango, yogurt, and milk. The egg “white” is made rubbery using agar, a substance made from seaweed. Calcium lactate increases the density of the mango “yolk” so that it cuts like the real thing.
This is just one example of what Bardin describes as “the magic of transformation,” which graduate students from Steinhardt’s food studies program and Tisch’s Interactive Telecommunications Program explore in this studio and seminar course. Throughout the semester, they learn the basic principles of food biochemistry, enzymology, molecular gastronomy, and modernist cuisine—all in order to use food as a material to tell stories that are personal to them. The projects they create, from studies of tuna fishing in Sardinia to the role of wasabi root in Japanese cuisine, explore food as it relates to the senses, technology, history, politics, and culture.