A culinary scam?

For the most part, for-profit educational institutions make huge promises, take your money, and give nothing. I have been good friends with a chef and restaurant owners and they say it is more than bending over a hot stove. The restaurant business is a tough business and demands 24 hour involvement. Sometimes the glamor isn't there.

"Top Chef Dreams: Are Cooking Schools a Rip-Off?"

by

Kayla Webley

July 27th, 2011

Time

The idea of becoming a gourmet chef and maybe even owning your own restaurant someday is one of those enduring fantasies that percolates through each generation. And today, with the popularity of star-making competition shows like Bravo's Top Chef and Food Network's Iron Chef the concept of cooking your way to a new career is even more alluring. So perhaps it's no surprise then that the bottom lines of for-profit education companies in the business of selling those chef's hat dreams are soaring.

As the economy continues to limp along, the drive to get a leg up in competitive fields like gourmet cooking is only increasing. Overall enrollment at for-profit trade schools, which includes culinary schools, has expanded by about 20% a year for the past two years, according to the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities. For example, one company, the Career Education Corporation which operates 17 culinary schools nationwide has seen their enrollment increase by more than 46% since 2008, according to company spokesman Mark Spencer.

And the students flocking to attend culinary schools are paying pretty penny. According to data recently released by the Department of Education, tuition at a culinary school can run students upward of $30,000. For example, the Le Cordon Bleu (LCB) branch in Orlando charges $35,130 for its 21-month associates degree in Culinary Arts. Thanks in part to that hefty price tag, LCB's parent company, the aforementioned Career Education Corporation, has seen their profits balloon. Last year the company reported a revenue of $1.84 billion, a 63% increase from 2007.

But the numbers aren't as good for students at culinary schools. Many enroll sold on the idea of being a chef, but wake up to the harsh reality of low-paying line cook jobs and mountains of debt upon graduation. About 800 current and former students are involved in a class action lawsuit in California that alleges the Le Cordon Bleu branch in Pasadena, formerly called the California School of Culinary Arts, "falsely led students to believe they would be able to obtain employment as chefs after graduation — and make a chef's salary thereby enabling them to pay off their loans within a reasonable period of time," according to Michael Louis Kelly, an attorney representing the students.

One of those students, Daniel Vasquez, says he has had difficulty finding work other than as a line cook — a lower paying job that he likely could have gotten without having footed the bill to attend culinary school. Vasquez became interested in the culinary institute after seeing a commercial on TV which he says led him to believe that if he went to the school he would become a chef. When he enrolled in 2005, he says he was told by an admissions officer that it would be "easy" for him to obtain a job as a Sous Chef (an apprentice chef) upon graduation where he could expect to start at $18/hour. Vasquez was so convinced that he took out $65,018 in loans to cover the tuition for the 18-month program ($45,148) as well as associated fees, supplies, his uniform and living expenses.

In the years since graduation, Vasquez, for the most part, has been unable to find culinary jobs that pay more than $10-12 an hour and as a result has been unable to make payments on his loans. And while the school changed its recruitment materials nationwide in July 2009 to make it clear students cannot expect to be chefs upon graduation — it now lists more realistic post-graduation career opportunities — that's cold comfort to Vasquez who is now nearly $80,000 in debt. "I'm not sure I will ever be able to pay it off," Vasquez told TIME. "I never would have borrowed the money if I knew I wouldn't be able to repay it. I went to this school so I could be ahead, jump start my future, but now, who knows."

That's the problem, says Eric Greenspan, rising Food Network star and head chef and owner of The Foundry on Melrose, a high-end restaurant in Los Angeles. He thinks students enroll in the programs hoping to skip to the head of the pack, only to find out that they still have to start on the bottom rung of the ladder. In entry level cooking jobs like a line cook or working with a caterer, a typical starting wage is $9-10/hour, Greenspan says. "These kids are paying law school prices and [culinary schools] are training them for minimum wage jobs," he adds. While instead, he says, students would be better off getting their foot in the door with a chef they admire and working very hard to climb their way to the top. "How do rock stars become famous? They work hard. They don't go to guitar schools," he says.

That argument taps into the perennial debate over the usefulness of higher education — whether creative careers like cooking, fashion design or even journalism are best learned by going to school or if it is best to get your foot in the door and learn on the job. One of the largest benefits of going to school is to make connections to people in the field. That was true for Jim Hanson, who graduated from Le Cordon Bleu's Minneapolis branch nine months ago. He says the $34,000 or so he paid for his associates degree in baking and pastry arts was worth the cost, even though he had to take out student loans, in large part because the school connected him to his current employer. While working as a student worker at the school while he attended classes, Hanson was introduced to the owner of Chez Arnaud, a French bakery in Minneapolis, where he now works as the head baker (and recently won a local award for "Best Baguette"). "It was all worth it," he told TIME. "Without [Le Cordon Bleu], I wouldn't have gotten anywhere near this job." Hanson, who estimates that he will be able to pay off his student loans in 5 to 10 years, said the cost of the program was intimidating at first since he would "be paying for this for a while," but ultimately he decided it was a financial risk he was willing to take. "This was an investment I wanted to make for myself," he says.

And it's true that the onus is on the students to make sure that their aspirations are realistic in relation to their budgets and their local job market. "Students are always making an informed decision and should fully understand what is involved," says Brian Moran, the interim president of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, a group that represents for-profit schools nationwide. "If they are taking loans they need to understand their responsibilities — the total picture."

But as Greenspan notes, culinary schools do a very good job of tapping into the psyche of wannabe chefs. "Culinary schools sell people on their love of cooking," he says. "They're selling the dream." Indeed, a recent advertisement on Google for the Arizona Culinary Institute a private, for-profit culinary school that charges $25,990 for its nine month program, read: "Ready to follow your dream?" But if the number of competitors on Top Chef and The Next Iron Chef has proven anything, it's that while there are a lot of people who want to be chefs, far fewer see those dreams come true.

Culinary books--old

Othmer Library...

• Culinary chemistry: Culinary chemistry, exhibiting the scientific principles of cookery, with concise instructions for preparing good and wholesome pickles, vinegar, conserves, fruit jellies, marmalades, and various other alimentary substances employed in domestic economy, with observations on the chemical constitution and nutritive qualities of different kinds of food (London, 1821).
  
  
• "There is death in the pot": A treatise on adulterations of food, and culinary poisons: exhibiting the fraudulent sophistications of bread, beer, wine, spirituous liquors, tea, coffee, cream, confectionery, vinegar, mustard, pepper, cheese, olive oil, pickles, and other articles employed in domestic economy; and methods of detecting them (London, 1820)
  
  
• Brewing: A treatise on the art of brewing: exhibiting the London practice of brewing porter, brown stout, ale, table beer and various other kinds of malt liquors (London, 1820)
  
  
• Winemaking: A treatise on the art of making wine from native fruits : exhibiting the chemical principles upon which the art of wine making depends; the fruits best adapted for home made wines, and the method of preparing them (London , 1820)

Alton Brown--science and cooking

Cooking...the good and the bad

Liquid nitrogen and culinary art?

Science and stove top goodies

Some culinary science

Ted Russin...CP Kelco...food science

Thanksgiving 2008

Liquid nitrogen and culinary art?

Using liquid nitrogen to prepare culinary delights is a far cry from the Happy Meal. Have we become jaded in food preparation? Maybe the simple delights of a meat and potato meal are sufficient.

"The Food Hacker Taking Kitchens to the Future with Science"

Every art needs its scientist. Now cooking has its own. Get ready for the next generation of food to make your head hurt.

by

David Katz

December 1st, 2008

Esquire

You're thirsty. You have just tried a crunchy handful of one of Dave Arnold's edible experiments--homemade pork rinds that taste like fatty Cracker Jacks--and now you'd like something to wash it down with. The easy thing to do would be to pour a cup of tap water from the chrome dispenser in this classroom at the French Culinary Institute, where Arnold runs the culinary-technology program. But that would not be a very Dave Arnold way of getting a glass of water.

Instead, he snatches the cup from your hand and hurries to a closet-sized room containing two industrial gas tanks--carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide. One of his lab techs connects the gas mixer's rubber hose to one end of a two-liter bottle filled with New York City tap and begins to inject the water with gas. Arnold takes a sip, makes a dissatisfied face, adjusts the ratio of nitrous to carbon dioxide, and hands over a homemade carbonated water that is soft, creamy, and sweet. That is the Dave Arnold way of getting a glass of water.

Over the past two decades, chefs who rely on science to push the boundaries of cooking have had a huge impact on the world's fine-dining scene. Arnold is their enabler. As cooking science has grown more sophisticated, standard kitchen equipment and techniques just don't do the trick. That's why FCI, a school with roots in traditional cooking and techniques, has built a whole new department around Arnold--a tireless inventor and experimenter who the school believes will not only develop new techniques but also make FCI the intellectual epicenter for this kind of cuisine.

"There's no reason you can't mess with anything and everything," says Arnold, as he manically checks on one of several experiments he has in progress. But he stresses that there's no reason to mess with things if the end result won't be better than the original. "When you create a goddamned delicious product that you can't make in any other way, and it's not just a gimmick, that's when we win," he says.

Although Arnold, thirty-seven, is frequently consulted by the world's most avant-garde chefs--Momofuku's David Chang, Jean Georges's Johnny Iuzzini, and especially WD-50's Wylie Dufresne--he has had no formal culinary training himself. His degree from Yale is in philosophy, and he has an M.F.A. from Columbia. But he's always had an innate mechanical ability and a deep passion for cooking and food history. So one night at WD-50, Arnold introduced himself to Dufresne, and the two discovered a mutual obsessive interest in pushing the technical aspects of cooking. They began an informal collaboration that would eventually lead Arnold to FCI, where he now finds himself teaching students how to operate a rotary evaporator.

Currently the evaporator holds a flask filled with vodka that's blended with enough habanero pepper to kill a man. When the machine is turned on, the alcohol gradually evaporates and collects in another container, taking the habanero flavor with it but leaving the color and severe heat behind. The result is crystal-clear booze that tastes like habanero pepper--deep and smoky--but without any of the habanero burn.

Arnold decides to mix the habanero vodka with ice cubes made of clarified apple juice and garnish it with a cucumber infused with lime. Then he fills an insulated bucket with liquid nitrogen (temperature: --320 degrees), reminds his guests to lower their safety goggles, dips a glass in by its stem, and pulls it out so cold it's smoking. That is the Dave Arnold way to chill a cocktail glass.


Alton Brown--science and cooking

Some culinary science

Trade schools...a pit of problems

You have heard of them and seen them buy huge blocks of advertising on television [American National University, Colorado Technical University, DeVry University, ITT Technical Institute, Vatterott College, Wright Business College, and many more]. They offer an alternative to a four plus year standard college education in a multitude of vocational areas [Automotive Technician, Business Marketing, Criminal Justice, E-Commerce, Health Care, Electronics. HVAC, interior decorating, paralegal, etc.] Not a bad idea...vocational/tech schools have been around for a long time and many of them are worthy in their goals of providing basic skills in a particular trade. But things have changed. The job market has changed. Traditional college education systems have changed. My first complaint is that of the usage of the word "college" and "university". Many of these vocational schools just tack one of the two words at the end and somehow they assume an aura of authenticity and scholastic status. Wrong. Bona fide higher education institutions must meet certain requirements before those words are added. For example, a school must offer accredited Ph. D. programs to hold the "university" status. I don't think any of the votech school offer a single Ph.D. program. The second complaint involves basic human communication skills...like writing and a command of the language. None of these schools offer such a program. They are ideally interested only in the "nuts and bolts" of a trade...those things that will enable a student to acquire the skills of a trade. There is money to be made at these institutions especially when certain government funds are involved. As far as I am concerned many of these schools are fraudlent, dishonest, and taking advantage of the "down and out" individual.

"In Hard Times, Lured Into Trade School and Debt"

by

Peter S. Goodman

March 13th, 2010

The New York Times

One fast-growing American industry has become a conspicuous beneficiary of the recession: for-profit colleges and trade schools.

At institutions that train students for careers in areas like health care, computers and food service, enrollments are soaring as people anxious about weak job prospects borrow aggressively to pay tuition exceeding $30,000 a year.

But the profits have come at substantial taxpayer expense while often delivering dubious benefits to students, according to academics and advocates for greater oversight of financial aid. Critics say many schools exaggerate the value of their degree programs, selling young people on dreams of middle-class wages while setting them up for default on untenable debts, low-wage work and a struggle to avoid poverty. And the schools are harvesting growing federal student aid dollars, including Pell grants awarded to low-income students.

“If these programs keep growing, you’re going to wind up with more and more students who are graduating and can’t find meaningful employment,” said Rafael I. Pardo, a professor at Seattle University School of Law and an expert on educational finance. “They can’t generate income needed to pay back their loans, and they’re going to end up in financial distress.”

For-profit trade schools have long drawn accusations that they overpromise and underdeliver, but the woeful economy has added to the industry’s opportunities along with the risks to students, according to education experts. They say these schools have exploited the recession as a lucrative recruiting device while tapping a larger pool of federal student aid.

“They tell people, ‘If you don’t have a college degree, you won’t be able to get a job,’ ” said Amanda Wallace, who worked in the financial aid and admissions offices at the Knoxville, Tenn., branch of ITT Technical Institute, a chain of schools that charge roughly $40,000 for two-year associate degrees in computers and electronics. “They tell them, ‘You’ll be making beaucoup dollars afterward, and you’ll get all your financial aid covered.’ ”

Ms. Wallace left her job at ITT in 2008 after five years because she was uncomfortable with what she considered deceptive recruiting, which she said masked the likelihood that graduates would earn too little to repay their loans.

As a financial aid officer, Ms. Wallace was supposed to counsel students. But candid talk about job prospects and debt obligations risked the wrath of management, she said.

“If you said anything that went against what the recruiter said, they would threaten to fire you,” Ms. Wallace said. “The representatives would have already conned them into doing it, and you had to just keep your mouth shut.”

A spokeswoman for the school’s owner, ITT Educational Services, Lauren Littlefield, said the company had no comment.

The for-profit educational industry says it is fulfilling a vital social function, supplying job training that provides a way up the economic ladder.

“When the economy is rough and people are threatened with unemployment, they look to education as the way out,” said Harris N. Miller, president of the Career College Association, which represents approximately 1,400 such institutions. “We’re preparing people for careers.”

Concerned about aggressive marketing practices, the Obama administration is toughening rules that restrict institutions that receive federal student aid from paying their admissions recruiters on the basis of enrollment numbers.

The administration is also tightening regulations to ensure that vocational schools that receive aid dollars prepare students for “gainful employment.” Under a proposal being floated by the Department of Education, programs would be barred from loading students with more debt than justified by the likely salaries of the jobs they would pursue.

“During a recession, with increased demand for education and more anxiety about the ability to get a job, there is a heightened level of hazard,” said Robert Shireman, a deputy under secretary of education. “There is a lot of Pell grant money out there, and we need to make sure it’s being used effectively.”

The administration’s push has provoked fierce lobbying from the for-profit educational industry, which is seeking to maintain flexibility in the rules.

A Lucrative Business

The stakes are enormous: For-profit schools have long derived the bulk of their revenue from federal loans and grants, and the percentages have been climbing sharply.

The Career Education Corporation, a publicly traded global giant, last year reported revenue of $1.84 billion. Roughly 80 percent came from federal loans and grants, according to BMO Capital Markets, a research and trading firm. That was up from 63 percent in 2007.

The Apollo Group — which owns the for-profit University of Phoenix — derived 86 percent of its revenue from federal student aid last fiscal year, according to BMO. Two years earlier, it was 69 percent.

For-profit schools have proved adept at capturing Pell grants, which are a centerpiece of the Obama administration’s efforts to make higher education more affordable. The administration increased financing for Pell grants by $17 billion for 2009 and 2010 as part of its $787 billion stimulus package.

Two years ago, students at for-profit trade schools received $3.2 billion in Pell grants, according to the Department of Education, less than went to students at two-year public institutions. By the 2011-12 school year, the administration now estimates, students at for-profit schools should receive more than $10 billion in Pell grants, more than their public counterparts. (Those anticipated increases may shrink, depending on the outcome of wrangling in Congress over health care and student lending.)

Enrollment at for-profit trade schools expanded about 20 percent a year the last two years, more than double the pace from 2001-7, according to the Career College Association.

Mr. Miller, the association’s president, said for-profit schools were securing large numbers of Pell grants because their financial aid offices were diligent and because the schools served many low-income students.

But financial aid experts say the surge of federal money reaching such institutions reflects something else: their aggressive, sometimes deceitful recruiting practices.

Jeffrey West was working at a pet store near Philadelphia, earning about $8 an hour, when he saw advertisements for training programs offered by WyoTech, a chain of trade schools owned by Corinthian Colleges Inc., a publicly traded company that last year reported revenue of $1.3 billion.

After Mr. West called the school, an admissions representative drove to his house to sell him on classes in auto body refinishing and upholstering technology, a nine-month program that cost about $30,000.

Mr. West blanched at the tuition, he recalled, but the representative assured him the program amounted to an antidote to hard economic times.

“They said they had a very high placement rate, somewhere around 90 percent,” he said. “That was one of the key factors that caused me to go there. They said I would be earning $50,000 to $70,000 a year.”

Some 14 months after he completed the program, Mr. West, 21, has failed to find an automotive job. He is working for $12 an hour weatherizing foreclosed houses.

With loan payments reaching $600 a month, he is working six and seven days a week to keep up.

“I’ve got $30,000 in student loans, and I really don’t have much to show for it,” he said. “It’s really frustrating when you’re trying to better yourself and you wind up back at Square One.”

Corinthian says it bars its recruiters from making promises about pay.

“The majority of our students graduate,” said a spokeswoman, Anna Marie Dunlap, in a written statement. “Most see a significant earnings increase.”

The increase in market opportunities for the for-profit education industry comes as governments spend less on education. In states like California, community colleges have been forced to cut classes just when demand is greatest.

“This is creating a very ripe environment for the for-profit schools to pick off more students,” said Lauren Asher, president of the Institute for College Access & Success, a nonprofit research group based in California that seeks to make higher education more affordable. “The risks of exploitation are higher, and the potential rewards of those practices are higher.”

For-profit culinary schools have long drawn criticism for leading students to rack up large debts. Now, they are enjoying striking growth. Enrollment at the 17 culinary schools of the Career Education Corporation — most of them operated under the name Le Cordon Bleu — swelled by 31 percent in the final months of last year from a year earlier.

When Andrew Newburg called the Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Portland, Ore., to seek information, he was feeling pressure to start a new career. It was 2008, and his Florida mortgage business was a casualty of the housing bust. An associate degree in culinary arts from a school in the food-obsessed Pacific Northwest seemed like a portal to a new career.

The tuition was daunting — about $41,000 for a 14-month program — but he said the admissions recruiter portrayed it as the entrance price to a stable life.

“The recruiter said, ‘The way the economy is, with the recession, you need to have a safe way to be sure you will always have income,’ ” Mr. Newburg said. “ ‘In today’s market, chefs will always have a job, because people will always have to eat.’ ”

According to Mr. Newburg, the recruiter promised the school would help him find a good job, most likely as a line cook, paying as much as $38,000 a year.

Last summer, halfway through his program and already carrying debts of about $10,000, Mr. Newburg was alarmed to see many graduates taking jobs paying as little as $8 an hour washing dishes and busing tables, he said. He dropped out to avoid more debt.

“They have a basic money-making machine,” Mr. Newburg said.

More Bills Than Paychecks

Career Education says admissions staff are barred from making promises about jobs or salaries. The school requires students to sign disclosures stating that they understand that its programs afford no guarantees.

But promotional materials convey a sense of promise.

“Our students are given the tools needed to become the future leaders in the industry,” proclaims the Le Cordon Bleu Web site. “Many graduates have attained positions of responsibility, visibility, and entrepreneurship soon after completing their studies.”

The job placement results that the school files with accrediting agencies suggest a different outcome. From July 2007 to June 2008, students who graduated from the culinary arts associate degree program landed jobs that paid an average of $21,000 a year, or about $10 an hour. Oregon’s minimum wage is $8.40 an hour.

The job placement list is cited in a class-action lawsuit filed against the Portland school — previously known as Western Culinary Institute — by graduates who allege fraud, breach of contract and unlawful trade practices. Executives at Career Education denied the allegations while asserting it would be wrong to judge the school on the basis of its graduates’ first jobs.

“You go out in the industry and work your way up,” said Brian R. Williams, the company’s senior vice president for culinary arts.

On a recent morning at the campus in Portland, hundreds of students donning chef’s whites labored in demonstration kitchens stocked with stainless steel countertops and commercial gas ranges. A chef inspected plates of boeuf Bourgogne and risotto Milanese. Students melted and pulled sugar into multicolored ribbons. Others used a chainsaw to sculpture blocks of ice into decorative centerpieces.

“It’s employable skills; that’s what we teach people here,” said the school president, Jon Alberts. “We try to give them as much of an industry experience in the classroom as possible.”

But several local chefs said the program merely simulated what students could learn in entry-level jobs.

“When they graduate and come in the kitchen, I tell them, ‘I’m going to treat you like you don’t know anything,’ ” said Kenneth Giambalvo, executive chef at Bluehour, an upscale restaurant in Portland’s Pearl District. “It doesn’t really give them any edge.”

What the school does give many students is debt, often at double-digit interest rates — debt that even bankruptcy cannot erase without a lengthy, low-odds legal proceeding.

When TJ Williams arrived in Portland from his home in Utah to enroll at Le Cordon Bleu in 2007, he was shocked by the terms of the aid package the school had arranged for him: One loan, for nearly $14,000, carried a $7,327 “finance charge” and a 13 percent interest rate.

“They told me that halfway through the program, I could probably refinance to a lower rate,” he said.

When he tried to refinance, the school turned him down, he says.

Career Education declined to discuss Mr. Williams’s case, citing privacy restrictions and saying he had not signed a waiver.

Mr. Williams has been jobless since last fall and recently returned to Utah, where he moved in with his mother.

After Graduation

The Career Education Corporation e-mailed The New York Times names and contact information for four graduates “with whom we hope you’ll touch base for important perspective.” One came with a wrong number. A second had graduated 15 years ago.

A third, Cherie Thompson, called the program “a really positive experience” but declined to discuss her debts or earnings. The fourth, Ericsel Tan, graduated in 2003 and later earned $42,000 a year overseeing catering at a convention center near Seattle. He said his success reflected his seven years of kitchen experience prior to culinary school.

Career Education notes that only 5.9 percent of the federal loans to students at the Western Culinary Institute that began to come due in 2007 — the latest available data — are listed in default by the Department of Education.

But default rates have traditionally reflected only those borrowers who fail to pay in the first two years payments are due.

The Department of Education has begun calculating default rates for three years. By that yardstick, Western Culinary’s default rate more than doubles, to 12.5 percent.

For-profit schools have ramped up their own lending to students to replace loans formerly extended by Sallie Mae, the student lending giant.

These loans are risky: Career Education and Corinthian recently told investors they had set aside roughly half the money allocated this year for private lending to cover anticipated bad debts.

Financial aid experts say such high rates of expected default prove that graduates will not earn enough to make their payments, yet the loans make sense for the for-profit school industry by enabling the flow of taxpayer funds to their coffers: they satisfy federal requirements that at least 10 percent of tuition money come from students directly or from private sources.

“They’re making so much money off their federal student loans and grants that they can afford to write off their own loans,” said Ms. Asher of the Institute for College Access & Success.

Ted Russin...CP Kelco...food science

Edible beads.

"Food science can be yummy"

Ted Russin helps top chefs stay at (and sharpen) the cutting edge of what's possible in food

by

Betty Hallock

April 29th, 2009

Los Angeles Times

"It's like being a choreographer. You have to have a certain amount of technique before you can create a dance."-- Ted Russin.

A low-slung, '50s-era office complex in the middle of a commercial park in San Diego doesn't look much like a hotbed of progressive cuisine. But here in Food Lab 1 at a company called CP Kelco, food scientist Ted Russin is doing his part to spark the imaginations of chefs.

Russin started working at CP Kelco in early 2006. The company makes hydrocolloids such as pectin, carrageenan, gellan gum, cellulose gum and xanthan gum--substances that can thicken liquids or turn them into gels. They hold a special interest fo chefs looking to present familiar flavors in new forms and are the crux of cutting-edge cooking. These items are staples in many high-end chefs' repertoires, whether they want to tie foie gras into knots or make smoother, silkier sauces.

But encapsulating liquid in a gel exterior (like the Ferran Adria olives at the Bazaar in Beverly Hills) or making sure the gellan coating for one's fish has a desirable texture requires understanding some of the science behind these ingredients."It's like being a choreographer," says Russin, who has studied ballet. "You have to have a certain amount of technique before you can create a dance."

Russin, 34, wears a white lab coat; two Sharpies and a digital timer are tucked in his pocket. He looks boyish and wears glasses, and the crown of his brown hair is styled into a short peak that intimates irreverence (after all, he was a member of a metal band called Shrifft and has on at least one occasion taken his two-wheel-drive Neon off-roading in the desert east of San Diego). He has a bachelor's in philosophy, a cooking certificate (he was briefly chef de partie at a French restaurant in Winnipeg, Canada) and a master's in food science and agricultural chemistry.

Chefs such as Thomas Keller and Corey Lee of the French Laundry and Kyle Connaughton, research chef at the Fat Duck, have tapped Russin to help hammer out ideas or perfect methods .

Most of CP Kelco's business is with major food manufacturing companies that make sauces by the vat, but Russin says working directly with high-end chefs gives him a chance to bridge the gap between the culinary arts and food science -- "to straddle the divide between these two related yet somewhat distant disciplines and create new food ideas from this collaboration."

The '50s and '60s were the golden age of food science, Russin says. "Frozen dinners were a huge leap." Another big innovation in food was laminated packaging, he says. "And Cool Whip is extraordinary," from a food science perspective. Who knows whether chefs deep-frying mayonnaise and making drinks that are simultaneously hot and cold could spur the next transcendent leap?

"I'm assuming this is kind of how haute couture works," Russin says. What starts in cutting-edge restaurants may inspire what ends up in the aisles of the supermarket. "I'm somewhere in the middle. It's a very exciting place to be."

"When we first started carrying this stuff, everybody thought we were crazy," says Fany Setiyo, a sales representative for Le Sanctuaire, a supplier of ingredients to chefs. Le Sanctuaire (which has a San Francisco showroom and online store) now carries about 30 hydrocolloids from various producers.

Russin talks about desserts as "systems" and discusses cooking in terms of heuristic techniques but also has the ability to convey complicated concepts. "Sometimes he'll go off on something, and I'll say, 'Ted, break it down to me in 10 words or less,' and he does," says Adrian Vasquez, pastry chef at Providence. "Ted, in my book, is a genius."

Russin formulates salad dressings and comes up with products such as a foam for coffee that can be squirted out of a can and a self-layering dessert for which CP Kelco has submitted a patent application. "What is possible?" he says. "That's where the conversation begins."

"Food scientist works alongside chefs to dream up new ideas"

CP Kelco's Ted Russin in San Diego straddles the divide between food science and culinary arts, bringing the cutting edge to the dining table

by

Betty Hallock

April 1st, 2009

Los Angeles Times

A low-slung, '50s-era office complex in the middle of a commercial park in San Diego doesn't look much like a hotbed of progressive cuisine.

But here in Food Lab 1 at a company called CP Kelco, food scientist Ted Russin is doing his part to spark the imaginations of chefs.

Russin is holding a blowtorch to a disk of what looks like lemon-yellow Jell-O, except that it's made with gellan gum instead of gelatin. He keeps blasting away at it, in the interest of demonstrating its heat-resistant properties (gellan gum is produced by bacteria discovered on a lily pad in Pennsylvania in the 1970s).

"If you've ever blowtorched gelatin, it's a horrible, horrible thing," he says. But the gel in his pan looks generally unfazed; the sugar is starting to caramelize, but the disk is otherwise holding its shape.

FOR THE RECORD:

Rancho Bernardo Inn: In Wednesday's Food section, an article about a food scientist at CP Kelco stated that Rancho Bernardo Inn is in Escondido. The resort is in San Diego. -


"It can withstand deep-frying. You can serve warm gelées," he says. Or, as Fat Duck chef Heston Blumenthal uses it, you can make sorbet and ice cream that don't immediately melt when flambéed.

That's the magic of hydrocolloids, substances that can thicken liquids or turn them into gels. They hold a special interest for chefs who are looking for ways to present familiar flavors in new forms, the crux of cutting-edge cooking. CP Kelco makes hydrocolloids such as pectin, carrageenan, gellan gum, cellulose gum and xanthan gum. "Our expertise is texture modification, anywhere where you need to control water," Russin says. "There's a lot of water in food, a heck of a lot of water."

Familiar pantry items such as starch and gelatin are hydrocolloids, as are agar and pectin.

Keeping it together

Hydrocolloids are what prevent bottled salad dressings from separating into water and oil. And they're staples in many high-end chefs' repertoires, whether they want to tie foie gras into knots or make smoother, silkier sauces.

But encapsulating liquid in a gel exterior or making sure the gellan coating for one's fish has a desirable texture requires understanding some of the science behind these ingredients.

"It's like being a choreographer," says Russin, who has studied ballet. "You have to have a certain amount of technique before you can create a dance."

Chefs such as Thomas Keller and Corey Lee of the French Laundry and Kyle Connaughton, research chef at the Fat Duck, have tapped Russin to help hammer out ideas, perfect methods or discuss the science of cooking in general. "He has been a great resource for us in understanding these ingredients," says Lee, who has visited the lab in San Diego. "He has worked on several experiments with us so it's not just trial and error. There's an approach to ingredients where we're not just throwing darts here."

In Keller's latest book, "Under Pressure: Cooking Sous Vide," gellan gum is an ingredient in a recipe for a mango "yolk," a sphere that has a gel exterior surrounding mango juice. He credits CP Kelco with helping to develop the recipe, which involves dropping spoonfuls of mango juice mixed with gellan gum and sodium hexametaphosphate (used to keep the mixture from setting right away) into a bath of water containing calcium gluconate, which sets the gel.

This is the technique behind Ferran Adria's "liquid olives," though he uses different hydrocolloids.

Most of CP Kelco's business is with major food manufacturing companies that make sauces by the vat, but Russin says working directly with high-end chefs gives him a chance to bridge the gap between the culinary arts and food science -- "to straddle the divide between these two related yet somewhat distant disciplines and create new food ideas from this collaboration."

The '50s and '60s were the golden age of food science, Russin says. "Frozen dinners were a huge leap." Another big innovation in food was laminated packaging, he says. "And Cool Whip is extraordinary," from a food science perspective. Who knows whether chefs deep-frying mayonnaise and making drinks that are simultaneously hot and cold could spur the next transcendent leap?

"I'm assuming this is kind of how haute couture works," Russin says. What starts in cutting-edge restaurants may inspire what ends up in the aisles of the supermarket. "I'm somewhere in the middle. It's a very exciting place to be."

Russin, 34, wears a knee-length white lab coat; two Sharpies and a digital timer are tucked into his pocket. He looks boyish and wears glasses, and the crown of his brown hair is styled into a short peak that intimates irreverence (after all, he was a member of a metal band called Shrifft and has on at least one occasion taken his two-wheel-drive Neon off-roading in the desert east of San Diego).

Growing up in Winnipeg, Canada, he showed early signs of taking up a career in food science. He recalls asking a teacher how to make Kool-Aid properly. "It turns out there is a right answer," he says. (You first mix the Kool-Aid with sugar and then stir the mixture into water.)

A new career path

He has a bachelor's degree in philosophy, a cooking certificate (he was briefly chef de partie at a French restaurant in Winnipeg), and a master's in food science and agricultural chemistry. He set out to be a philosophy professor and planned to work his way through graduate school by cooking, but says he had an "existential crisis" (he was reading Kierkegaard at the time) when told that academic job prospects were slim. "I spent every day for two months in the career center." Seminal experiments in cake baking for a junior high school science project helped solidify his decision to pursue a career in food science.

He started working at CP Kelco in early 2006. That wasn't long after technical support representative Amy Wong received a phone call from sales representative Fany Setiyo of Le Sanctuaire, a supplier of ingredients to chefs. Setiyo was trying to source a certain type of pectin on behalf of chef Ludovic Lefebvre, who was preparing for an appearance on "Iron Chef," and Wong overnighted some samples to New York.

Chefs from across the country were calling to ask for samples of the stuff CP Kelco sells to its food-manufacturing clients by the truckload. "We were spending a lot of time fielding calls," Wong says. A partnership was struck between CP Kelco and Le Sanctuaire, now the exclusive distributor of its products to chefs.

"When we first started carrying this stuff, everybody thought we were crazy," Setiyo says. "It was risky. What if it doesn't sell?" Le Sanctuaire (which has a San Francisco showroom and online store), now carries about 30 types of hydrocolloids from various producers.

"We knew what was going on with chefs was really interesting," says Wong, who along with Russin and Henri Monty, then director of innovations for the Americas, turned into a sort of culinary outreach team. "It's Ted who gives so much of his own time."

In the lab, Russin formulates salad dressings and comes up with products such as a foam for coffee that can be squirted out of a can and a self-layering dessert for which CP Kelco has submitted a patent application. He also has helped chefs in their kitchens and delivered lectures to enthusiasts, food professionals and students at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., and at Greystone in Napa, Calif., on topics such as "Hydrocolloids: An Overview and Toolbox" and "Different Kinds of Thick."

Russin is writing a chapter for a planned Culinary Institute text, "Introduction to Culinary Arts and Sciences," in which he covers physics and chemistry in the kitchen. And he is contributing to a forthcoming book about the techniques of modern cuisine by Chris Young, former manager of food research at the Fat Duck, and Nathan Myrhvold, former Microsoft chief technology officer.

Art of the possible

Russin tends to talk about desserts as "systems" and discusses cooking in terms of heuristic techniques but also has the rare ability to convey complicated concepts to laypeople. "Sometimes he'll go off on something, and I'll say, 'Ted, break it down to me in 10 words or less,' and he does," says Adrian Vasquez, pastry chef at Providence in Los Angeles. "Ted in my book is a genius."

When Russin stops by El Bizcocho, the restaurant at the Rancho Bernardo Inn in Escondido, he is treated like a minor celebrity. "I couldn't believe it when I found out that these guys were right here in our own backyard," executive chef Judd Canepari says.

Russin pulls out his laptop and opens a spreadsheet that shows the iterations of an experiment he'd worked on with chef de cuisine Steven Rojas. "Chefs make fun of me for this and then beg me to send it to them over e-mail," Russin says.

Rojas is making a rum-and-coke gel with gellan gum that he carbonates in a CO2 canister. He has been making it with 1% gellan gum. "That's really high. Do you know the brix?" Russin asks, referring to the dissolved solids-to-water ratio.

Another of Rojas' desserts comes to the table with a small glass container of watermelon gel. A server picks up the container, shakes it and the gel becomes a liquid, to be poured around compressed frozen watermelon and sorbet.

"I am constantly surprised by chefs' creativity," Russin says. "I had [WD-50 chef Wylie Dufresne's] deep-fried hollandaise and before tasting it I thought, 'I don't know why you would do that.' But it was tasty, unctuous, with a nice crust on the outside."

A lot of chefs are really having fun with it, he says. It's progress.

"What is possible?" Russin says. "That's where the conversation begins."


Alton Brown--science and cooking

Cooking...the good and the bad

Liquid nitrogen and culinary art?

Science and stove top goodies

Some culinary science

Thanksgiving 2008

Marco Polo and pasta

"Did Marco Polo bring pasta from China?"

by

Cristen Conger

TLC COOKING

Long before paper, gunpowder and the compass, the Chinese had invented yet another staple of human civilization. A coil of dry noodles, preserved for 4,000 years, sat beneath an overturned earthenware bowl at an archaeological site in northeastern China. In 2005, archaeologists discovered the spaghettilike tangle, effectively settling the score about whether the Chinese, Italians or Arabs began producing pasta first [source: BBC].

Instead of being made from ground wheat, as most pasta is, those ancient noodles were prepared from another cereal grass called millet. Although not native to their country, the Chinese later began growing wheat in the northern regions along the Yellow River by 3000 B.C. The first written records of a mixture called bing appeared between the fourth and second century B.C. [s­ource: Serventi, Sabban and Shugaar]. Bing referred to all products made from wheat dough, including breads and pastas. Around 300 B.­C., the Chinese scholar Shu Xi wrote an ode dedicated to the culinary cornerstone, describing the "fine and thin" bing stuffed with pork and mutton [source: Serventi, Sabban and Shugaar].

By the time Marco Polo arrived in China in 1274, the Chinese had well established their pasta cuisine. The medieval Chinese didn't cook pasta from dried strands, like the kind we buy from the grocery store. Instead, theirs always was made from fresh dough. They also isolated gluten, the compound in wheat that provides elasticity for kneading and stretching, and created pastas from different starches, such as rice and soybeans.

In the 17 years that Marco Polo ­spent in China, dining with the likes of Kublai Khan, he certainly sampled the various forms of Asian pasta. According to one edition of Marco Polo's "Description of the World," which the Venetian merchant wrote after returning home from the East, he ate dishes similar to macaroni during his stint. From that brief mention, a legend arose that the famed explorer must've introduced pasta to Italy. What else could explain the gastronomical bridge between two distant countries?

But as any gourmand worth an ounce of orzo will quickly tell you, there isn't a grain of truth to Polo as the pasta pioneer.

Origin of Italian Pasta

Incredibly, the emergence of Italian pasta occurred in total isolation from China. Before Marco Polo left for his China expedition in 1292, Italy had discovered the culinary delights of pasta centuries earlier. The Arab geographer Idrisi described the pasta he encountered in Sicily in 1154 as made from flour and formed into long strings [source: Needham and Wang]. By the Mi­ddle Ages, Sicily and Sardinia had developed pasta trades as well.

When tracing the origins of Italian pasta, historians look to a plant, rather than an individual. The cultivation of durum wheat offers more clues to how Italian pasta evolved into the country's trademark food. Today, most of the pasta on store shelves comes from durum wheat, which has high levels of gluten. That gluten adds malleability to the pasta dough, making it easier to work with. The Chinese climate isn't conducive to durum wheat production, whereas the cereal thrives in Italy's environment. Ancient Greek and Roman civilizations grew durum wheat, but written records indicate that they stopped short of converting the ground grains, or semolina, into pasta and settled for breads and gruel [source: Serventi, Sabban and Shugaar].

Yet some food historians argue that the Greeks had more cooking in the kitchen that paved the way for pasta. For instance, the ancient Greek word meaning "ribbon" is itrion, and the Arabic word for "noodle" is the similar-looking itrijab [source: Bober]. In addition, Greek mythology includes a tale about the god Vulcan pushing dough through a device that converts it into thin, edible threads.

But that etymological explanation doesn't completely account for the leap from bread to pasta in Italy. A majority of food historians credit the Arabs for bringing pasta, along with spinach, eggplant and sugar cane, to the Mediterranean basin [source: Bober]. By the ninth century, Arab groups had expanded into Sicily and southern Italy, likely bringing along noodle-making techniques learned from their Eastern neighbors. By the 12th century, Arabs had also taught Italians their methods for drying pasta, which they would have used for preserving the food while traveling [source: Capatti, Montari and O'Healy].

As pasta production traveled up the Italian boot, Naples became the center of durum wheat pasta manufacturing. Today, Italians gobble up between 66 and 77 pounds (30 and 35 kilograms) of pasta every year, more than anywhere else in the world -- including China [source: Dendy and Dobraszczyk].

Sources:

Bober, Phyllis Pray. "Art, Culture, and Cuisine." University of Chicago Press. 2001. (Jan. 26, 2009)
http://books.google.com/books?id=3EoIE8vCHwQC

Capati, Alberto; Montanari, Massimo; and O'Healy Áine. "Italian Cuisine." Columbia University Press. 2003. (Jan. 26, 2009)
http://books.google.com/books?id=yeN7ycEYq1sC

Dendy, D.A.V. and Bogden, J. Dobraszczyk. "Cereals and Cereal Products." Springer. 2001. (Jan. 26, 2009)
http://books.google.com/books?id=b38oZ0QW-98C

Flandrin, Jean Louis; Montanari, Massimo; and Sonnenfeld, Albert. "Food." Columbia University Press. 1999. (Jan. 26, 2009)
http://books.google.com/books?id=FnwnXzTRA44C

Needham, Joseph and Wang, Ling. "Science and Civilization in China." Cambridge University Press. 2008. (Jan. 26, 2009)
http://books.google.com/books?id=FgtFxedkgbcC

"Oldest noodles unearthed in China." BBC. Oct. 12, 2005. (Jan. 26, 2009)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4335160.stm

Serventi, Silvano; Sabban, Françoise; and Shugaar, Antony. "Pasta: The Story of a Universal Food." Columbia University Press. 2002. (Jan. 26, 2009)
http://books.google.com/books?id=FFV9NEUIewkC

Cooking some pasta? You have started to boil some water and became busy with other kitchen concerns and noticed that the water was becoming aggressive and about to boil over the pan. Two primary solutions to the problem. Turn the heat down/off or add some common table salt of which you will probably need anyway to season the pasta. Adding the salt will for a short time increase the boiling activity and then suddenly become retarded in volatility. Why? The boiling point was raised calming the situation. Add the pasta and monitor the rolling action to finish cooking the pasta. Actually any non-volatile particulate could be used such as sand--yuck. [Similar idea is involved with ethylene glycol as an addition to water in an automobile's cooling system.] The salt [sodium chloride] exhibits nucleation sites that allow the water to rapidly boil and displace thermal energy. Next time: Check the ebullient frequently.

Speaking of pasta...why does dry spaghetti always break into several pieces?

"Why does dry spaghetti always break into several pieces -- and not just two pieces -- when snapped? This perplexing question has now been answered by two physicists at the University of Paris 6 in France, who say that elastic waves travelling along the pasta cause it to fragment. The result has applications in materials and civil engineering...."

"The physics of pasta"

Why certain prepared foods such as chili or pasta dishes are enhanced in flavor after cooking, chilling, and cooking the next day? The enhanced flavor of certain leftovers is do to the break down of the spices and seasoning used in the original preparation process and allowed to chemically blend together thus altering the intensity. This magic is done over time and in a cool environment. It may well also have to do with an individual's taste buds. But the fact remains that soups, chili, and pasta are enhanced in flavor upon re-cooking.

Martha Filipic [Ohio State University]:

Why is it that stews and soups always taste better after spending a day in the refrigerator?

Well, that's something that lies in the taste buds of the beholder, doesn't it? After all, some people actually despise leftovers, whether it's day-old meatloaf or yesterday's stew.

But many people would agree with you and swear that homemade foods like soups, stews, chili and spaghetti sauce all taste better after cooking them on the stove,then letting them sit in the refrigerator overnight. However, the scientific reasoning behind this phenomenon isn't clear-cut.

Many food scientists believe "flavor blending" is at work. That is, when you mix different ingredients together and add herbs and spices, their distinct flavors begin to merge. The longer they're together, the more they mingle. If scientists were to measure the compounds that produce the food's overall taste, they would initially find many spikes and peaks of the distinct flavors. Over time, those spikes and peaks would dissipate as the flavors combined. The chili powder in chili would become less harsh; the beans in the mix would be less "beany" but more flavorful from the spices, tomatoes and meat.

What's happening is that the chemicals and oils that produce flavor and aroma are being released from the different ingredients. That doesn't always happen quickly, and it may not totally occur while the food cooks.

You can see that kind of occurrence at work with the new "Magic Twist" Kool-Aid drinks. For example, the "Changin' Cherry" flavor starts green and turns blue -- although it always tastes like cherry. How does it work? It uses two colorings -- one yellow and the other blue. The initial color is a blend of the two, making the drink green. As more of the less-soluble blue coloring agent gets released, it overwhelms the yellow dye, changing the color of the beverage to blue. A similar but more subtle type of thing happens with flavor compounds: Some may take longer than others to be released.

Another factor also may affect the flavor of leftovers: As you reheat the food, more water is released as steam. That alone can intensify the flavor of your favorite soup, making you think it tastes better the next day.

Even before the food is to be prepared, some thought should be given to the cooking instruments used--the pots and pans. And some knowledge of the thermal source too--gas or electric.

The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 1

The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2

Cooking...the good and the bad

"Cooking Has Been Both Boon and Bane for Humans"

by

Michael Wall

February 13th, 2009

Wired

Raw-food devotees take note: Your diet is not in any way natural. Humans are as adapted to cooking our food as cows are to eating grass, or ticks are to sucking blood.

"Cooking is a human universal," said Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting here Friday. While cooking kills parasites and other pathogens, Wrangham believes this health benefit is not its primary contribution.

"The fundamental importance of cooking is that it provides increased sources of energy," he said.

And that boost may be what facilitated the leap in size between Homo erectus and modern Homo sapiens. But, cooking may also have helped some modern humans into an obesity epidemic.

Wrangham cited data showing that cooking increases the body's ability to digest starches (as found, for example, in bread, potatoes and bananas). Only about 50 percent of raw starches are digested, compared to 90 percent of cooked ones. The trend, and the numbers, are similar for protein: from 50 to 65 percent digestibility raw to better than 90 percent cooked.

The reason: Heat breaks down starch and protein molecules, making it easier for digestive enzymes to attack them.

Cooking also softens up food, meaning the body doesn't have to use as much energy to process it. We spend less time chewing cooked food, and we secrete fewer chemicals to break it down. A recent study gave rats identical diets, except half the animals were served softened pellets and the other half received hard ones. After 25 weeks, the rats eating soft food were significantly heavier and had 30 percent more body fat, Wrangham said.

We cook almost everything, except some fruits and vegetables, and we need to. People on raw-food diets lose weight almost without fail, because they can't access enough calories. Half of all women eating exclusively raw foods become so thin that they stop menstruating, he said.

And our bodies show the imprint of this dependence on cooking. We have small, soft teeth, and our guts are smaller than those of any other primate relative to body size.

These traits go back a long way. Humans have controlled fire for at least 200,000 years, and perhaps for much longer. In fact, Wrangham speculates that cooking may have spurred a huge leap in the evolution of H. sapiens' ancestor, H. erectus. He's written a book on the idea called Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, which will come out in June.

About 1.8 million years ago, the brain of H. erectus ballooned and its body got bigger. Its arms got shorter, its legs longer. It became, in short, less of an ape and more of a human. Mankind has not undergone anything approaching this anatomical transformation since.

"No really big changes are seen after H. erectus," Wrangham said.

He thinks cooking may have freed up enough energy and nutrients to feed H. erectus' burgeoning brain. And this is no trivial matter: Brain tissue burns through 16 times as much energy as a comparable chunk of skeletal muscle. But as yet, it is not known if H. erectus had mastered fire. Anthropologists have found what may be remnants of 2-million-year-old cooking fires, but the evidence is equivocal.

It's also possible that a change in climate keyed H. erectus' developmental quantum leap. Around 1.8 million years ago, Africa was drying out. Forests were changing into savannas. And savannas have many more herbivores — nearly three times as many by weight as forests do — said biological anthropologist William Leonard of Northwestern University, who also spoke at the AAAS meeting Friday. So increased meat on the hoof may also be part of the picture.

Whenever we began cooking, Wrangham's ideas bear on the United States' current obesity epidemic: 65 percent of Americans are overweight and 33 percent obese. We know that softened or otherwise processed foods are digested more easily, yet we do not take this into account in our diets.

"We're very bad at calorie-counting at the moment," Wrangham said. "Counting calories does not take into account the processibility of food. Biophysics is just as important as biochemistry in nutrition."


Alton Brown--science and cooking

Liquid nitrogen and culinary art?

Science and stove top goodies

Some culinary science

Thanksgiving 2008

Science and stove top goodies

"At the Stove, a Dash of Science, a Pinch of Folklore"

by

Kenneth Chang

January 6th, 2009

The New York Times

My mother, when she still cooked, always added a dash of sugar to the vegetables she stir-fried. She said it preserved the bright green of the greens. I always thought that was hooey.

Shirley O. Corriher, a biochemist turned folksy food scientist who was sitting at my dining table, said she had not heard of this — but added that sugar does do more to fruits and vegetables than add sweetness.

It also helps preserve their shape. Heat shrinks the plant cells and transforms molecules in the cell walls into pectin, which dissolves. "The cells are falling apart and leaking," said Ms. Corriher, who dissected the science of recipes in her books "Cookwise" and "Bakewise."

"It's mass death and destruction when you heat a fruit or vegetable," she said.

Adding sugar helps keep the glue between the cells intact, she said. "It's preventing the leaking of the acid."

I had invited Ms. Corriher and her husband, Arch, who were in New York from Atlanta for a visit, to dinner to help answer some kitchen curiosities. Cookbooks bark out instructions like boot camp orders — Add oil to pasta water! Salt the eggplant! Brown meat to seal in juices! — and legions of home cooks obediently follow them.

I wondered how many of these truisms had a scientific underpinning and how many were but myths. Browning meat, for instance, does not seal in juices. The char adds flavor, though.

On that evening, I cooked and Ms. Corriher critiqued, telling me why I was doing what I was doing or telling me that what I was doing was silly.

For a second opinion, I later called Harold McGee, who is the author of the food science bible "On Food and Cooking" and who writes "The Curious Cook" column in The Times's dining section.

Ms. Corriher's answer about sugar and vegetables has a factual basis. "Beans are a wonderful example of this," she said. "If you take beans, like Navy beans, cook them for four to six hours, they’re mush refried beans. But if you add sugar and molasses, you can cook them for days. They’re Boston baked beans."

Molasses has calcium, and Boston baked beans call for prodigious quantities of sugar and molasses. The sugar absorbs some of the water, slowing how fast the beans dissolve, and the calcium molecules reinforce the cell walls by linking together with the pectin.

As I grilled shrimp and garlic in a hot cast-iron pan, I asked: should one heat the cooking oil and pan at the same time or heat the pan before adding oil?

Heat the empty pan and then add oil, Ms. Corriher said. And whatever you do, she said, do not add the food when both the pan and oil are cold. That came from her attempts to scramble eggs at a boarding school that she and her first husband ran in the 1960s. "That liquid protein was going down in any nook and cranny in the pan and then you turned on the heat and literally you cooked the food into the pan," she said. "But if you got a hot surface, the food cooks on the surface, not in the surface."

Next dish: roasted brussels sprouts with bacon, browned on the stove in a cast-iron skillet and then roasted in the oven. The dish turned out fine, but I had unknowingly and luckily avoided producing a rotten egg stink. Brussels sprouts — and other vegetables of the Brassica family, including cabbage — release hydrogen sulfide as they cook, particularly when boiled for too long.

"Between five and seven minutes, they double in stinky hydrogen sulfide gas formed," Ms. Corriher said. My browning of the brussels sprouts on the stovetop was shorter than that. In the oven, the transfer of heat from hot air to vegetable occurs more slowly than immersion in boiling water.

A duck leg basted with a soy sauce-rice wine-garlic-ginger-honey sauce provided another lesson in browning.

In addition to adding sweetness, the honey helped brown the duck skin, taking advantage of chemical reactions described by Louis-Camille Maillard a century ago. In the Maillard reaction, at high temperatures, fructose and glucose in the honey reacts with amino acids in the duck, producing a variety of new molecules that add flavor and color.

Ms. Corriher offers this advice for imbuing roast turkey with a rich golden hue: baste it with honey or corn syrup, which is also full of fructose and glucose. These are so-called reducing sugars, which means they have a structure — "a funny tail," Ms. Corriher called it — known as a carbonyl group that takes part in the Maillard reaction. (Sucrose is not a reducing sugar, which is why sugar water does not brown the same way.)

Maillard reactions also produced the dark char on the slab of steak I turned to next. Where's the sugar in a steak? Animal cells contain glycogen, essentially the animal version of starch, which the cells use for storing energy. After the animal is killed, glycogen falls apart into glucose.

As I cooked, the smoke set off the fire alarm. No chemical mystery there: Where there's fire, there's smoke.

For a Chinese chili-braised fish recipe, taken from "Land of Plenty" by Fuchsia Dunlop, the first step calls for marinating the fish in rice wine for several minutes. That struck me as pointless. If you are about to braise a fish in tongue-searing chili sauce, what’s the point of soaking it in wine? The alcohol boils away, and the spiciness ought to obliterate any taste of the wine.

Ms. Corriher had an explanation. It was not the flavor of the wine that was important, but what it did. Alcohol is a solvent. "Some compounds dissolve in water," she said. "Some dissolve in fat. But alcohol dissolves both fat-soluble compounds and water-soluble compounds. You're pulling flavor compounds out of the fish so that they can contribute to the flavor in the sauce."

She recalled Patricia Wells, the Paris-based food writer, asking about the vodka in penne alla vodka: "She said, 'Shirley, why is it that a little vodka in a tomato sauce makes such a huge difference in the taste of the sauce? I boil it after the vodka is added so most of the vodka is gone.' But there's obviously a compound in tomatoes that alcohol dissolves and pulls out into the sauce. And then it doesn’t matter what happens to alcohol. It's done its job."

Mr. McGee agreed with the wine-as-solvent hypothesis, but suspected it was used for the exact opposite reason, to wash off-flavors off the fish. "It's a kind of post-washing cleansing," he said.

(I e-mailed Ms. Dunlop to ask the intended purpose of the wine. Mr. McGee was correct. "The purpose of marinating the fish in salt and wine is to 'qu xing wei' — to dispel so-called 'fishy flavors' (xing wei)," Ms. Dunlop wrote in an e-mail response. "This is a major preoccupation for Chinese chefs and home cooks.")

As for the sugar in stir-fried vegetables, Ms. Corriher decided after some thought that my mother's technique might make some sense. If the sugar slowed the release of acids, perhaps that would help preserve color as well as shape.

Mr. McGee disagreed. "A fraction of a teaspoon is a homeopathic dose," he said. But he added, he did not know for certain. Cooking is chemistry, and the only way to know for sure would be to employ the scientific method.

"If I had been her in your apartment, I would have said, 'Let's do an experiment,'" Mr. McGee said. "We have different interpretations, and an experiment would clarify who was right."


Alton Brown--science and cooking

Liquid nitrogen and culinary art?

Some culinary science

Thanksgiving 2008