 There seems to be a few parallels between the science of everyday thinking and science of cooking. What we're trying to do in our course is get people to think more scientifically, I suppose, about their everyday sort of experience. And what you're doing in science and cooking is obviously trying to bring food in the scientific method to the way that people kind of do things even in their own kitchen. How does science apply to cooking specifically? The point of our course, it sounds like, is very similar to the point of yours, which is that we wanted people to confront things that they think about and do every day and realize that there's science around them, you know, every place, and moreover that the scientific ways of thinking are embedded in what they're doing, just to sort of give a concrete context for learning what science really is. Just as an example, I mean, one of the sort of simple questions that we ask our students is to consider the recipes for cooking pasta. So, you know, if you go and you take a box of pasta, then it tells you roughly that you should boil water, and it tells you to boil a lot of water. So for, you know, roughly, if I'm remembering it right, for like half a kilogram of pasta, it tells you to put four liters of water, maybe even six liters of water into the pot, bring it to boil, and then you pour the pasta in. And, you know, then there are all of these, I guess I would call the myths, that, you know, sort of go along with that. There's the notion that you should put salt in the water to sort of affect the boiling properties. You should put oil in the water, and that might end. These are just sort of the myths, and the recipe is really the goal along with pasta making. And so, you know, part of science is learning to question everything, and, you know, one can certainly question pasta making, and, you know, even question the recipe on the box. So for example, you could ask yourself, does it, you know, if you were to use a small amount of water, could you still cook the pasta? I mean, is it really true that you need so much water? One of the things that we do in our class is we ask the students to both, you know, that as if they sort of understand the scientific basis for what is actually happening in the water when you put the pasta in, you can sort of think through that yourself, like, well, let's make a difference. But then, of course, you can always go and do the experiment. You can sort of, you know, cook pasta, you know, the way it says in the box, and you can cut the amount of water substantially and cook the pasta again. You can then boil them both according to the recipe. You can serve them to your family and discover if they can tell the difference. If they can't tell the difference, then clearly there is no difference. And one of the points of science, at least, you know, for us is that it allows you to generalize. It allows you to take ideas that, you know, apply in one situation. For example, the molten chocolate cake and learn how they can be used and what appears at first sight to be an entirely different situation, the cooking of a steak, and really, you know, map the two onto each other. Do you think people's tastes are kind of shaped by your experience? I think it must be. It must be. I mean, I think that's one reason, for example, why tasting a food for the first time can be sometimes unpleasant or you can have a certain experience with it, and then over time you kind of get used to it or your experience of that food changes. And I think also as we sort of experience foods as children and then we grow up and we suddenly we start to learn to appreciate coffee, I'm sure that has something to do with that. Our taste buds, our sort of, our experience of it is changing. And I'm sure there is a cultural component as well. And I wouldn't be surprised if there are subtleties to this, that, I mean, you know how when you get your favorite food that you can only get at home, that your grandmother cooks for you, how that has just tastes so special to you, but for an outsider it's just meatballs or whatever it would be. The scientific method is very useful for finding out whether there is something to a myth or not. Do you have any examples of myths in cooking? So one great example is, which is one of the labs for our edicts course, which is to make mac and cheese. And according to cooks there is four ways to thicken a sauce. And of course the whole idea with thickening a sauce is really so that it clings to the food better, so that we can sort of scoop up the sauce and it will stay in your mouth and give you that sensory experience. And so according to cooks there are four ways. One of them is just to reduce the sauce, which is just boil off the water. One of them is to use starch and starch expands when you put it in water and when you heat it. And so this thickens the sauce. Another way is just to add fat and this creates an emulsion, which also thickens the sauce. And then you can use various modernist thickeners such as santhan gum or gelatin or things like that. So one of the things we're asking students to do is to look at a mac and cheese recipe and to exclude each of these ingredients or exclude the cheese, exclude the flour and see how much the viscosity changes. And so you would get a very tangible way of seeing oh if I exclude the flour or if I exclude this much flour this is how the viscosity changes. And there are of course very fancy ways that you can measure viscosity. But there are also very simple ways and so we're asking students to take a tall glass, a transparent glass, put macaroni in it, pour sauce on top and basically measure how long it takes for the sauce to meander its way through to the bottom, which is viscosity. And it's exactly getting at that property that we want from the sauce of sticking to the macaroni and sort of giving us the whole dish. I think as scientists we often work with this very fancy expensive equipment in our laboratories but a lot of those equipments are just fancy ways of doing something that is actually very simple and a lot of it we can do on our own.