SSO 102
The Chemistry of Cooking and What We Eat
Nancy Goroff
Offered Spring 2008 and 2009
Everyone needs to eat. This seminar will explore how we meet that need, considering the biological and cultural aspects, but especially the chemistry of what goes on in the kitchen. The course will include demonstrations, discussions of readings, and student presentations. Each student will develop a research project over the course of the semester, examining one aspect of the chemistry of food.
Professor Goroff taught SSO 102: The Chemistry of Cooking in the Spring Semesters of 2008 and 2009. I caught up with her in August 2009 to reflect on her experience.
How did you pick this topic?
Well, it’s a topic that I love. I love to cook and bake, and, being a chemist, I’ve been interested in it from that point of view. But it’s a course that I would never be able to teach in the department as a regular course. We have too many other courses that need to be covered, and so this was a great opportunity for me to teach something that I really enjoy, that would be showing students something from a different point of view from the way they usually look at it.
We have pictures of your class, up on our website, making muffins. What were they getting out of the muffin assignment?
We talk about the difference between quick breads and yeast breads. There are differences in the chemistry. In bread, you want what we call “developing the gluten”, where we get all the protein molecules lined up, so that it’s stretchier, and as a result a bit tougher, but for a muffin, you don’t want that toughness, so you stir muffins for about 20 seconds and you’re done, and bread, on the other hand, you knead for a long time to develop the gluten, so it’s the opposite, depending on what your goal is.
So it doesn’t have anything to do with your research?
My research is not at all involved with cooking. My research is organic material, organic chemistry. So I suppose cooking has a lot of organic chemistry in it, but I am really focused on making new polymers, small molecules and organic semiconductors.
What did you want your students to get out of the course?
Well, I guess a few things. I wanted them to think about a topic that was familiar to them, that is food, from a scientific point of view, and read things that are in popular literature (newspapers, magazines) with the science in mind, so, with a little more critical eye to what they’re reading and whether it makes sense scientifically or not.
I had them do several presentations during the semester, so getting them used to presentations [was a goal]. I had them do one research project either alone or with a partner. The research project could be either a literature-based research project, which for a lot of them meant web-based, or it could be something where they actually did an experiment in the lab. But I wanted to get them to ask scientific questions and think about how to go about answering them.
I saw that you did some cooking in class, as well....
Yes, there were demonstrations pretty much every class. I would get volunteers to help with stirring something or kneading something, or whatever was the task at hand, but mostly it was demonstrations and tasting things. So I would have them taste different foods to compare them. For example, the first or second day, we did whipped cream made fresh and Ready-Whip from a can and Cool-whip, and talked about the difference in the chemistry and the similarity in those in taste.
Each class there was something for them to taste, some cooking demonstration for them to see, and there were readings for each class, usually magazine or newspaper articles. There was a textbook for the class. There is a great book by Harold McGee called On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen that served as a basis for a lot of the readings. Then they had various homework assignments. They had to keep track of what they ate for three days, do a food journal. They had to bring in recipes and analyze them in different ways. One of their presentations was to find three different recipes for the same food and analyze the similarities and differences between the recipes. They had a research project. For the research project they had to do a presentation, and they had to present the research as a poster, so I had them all come and look at science research posters that we have and how you can present research in terms of a poster.
Which assignments worked particularly well?
I think the research projects worked pretty well. I think I still haven’t quite figured out how to get students to understand the difference between a report and a research project. They’re coming from high school and they still, a lot of them, think that if you just put a bunch of information up, that’s a research project, and I wanted them to really have more analysis in their projects than a lot of them did. I think this time I did a better job conveying that than the first time around, because I was more aware that that was an issue.
The demonstrations work well, and everyone is very happy with them, but I think they also make an impression in that the students remember the chemistry. I had several students tell me that they learned more in my class than in the General Chemistry course they took, which I don’t think is literally true. But what they mean is that the chemistry they learned in my course, they remember better and it makes more sense, because they are seeing it in this different context. I think those demonstrations are particularly effective for that.
This recipe analysis worked on one level, but the thing I struggle with in SSO 102 the most was getting students to move into a college-level approach to coursework, that there should be more analysis. The course is so short that there’s not a lot of time for development of those skills. So I tried to explain, when I made assignments, what I was looking for, and some students got it and did well, and other students didn’t get it or chose not to spend the time on it, it could be either one or a combination of both. There is just not enough time in the semester. It’s only 15 hours of course time, so it’s just not that many minutes, and you can’t assign them a lot of assignments to help them learn along the way. I think that was something that I felt like I made progress with and that they made progress with it, but there wasn’t enough time in the semester to really develop it fully. I would like them, by the end of their freshman year, to know what a college-level assignment is.
What did you get out of the course?
It’s fun. It’s fun to think about chemistry and cooking. I got to know some freshman, which was fun, and they seemed to enjoy the class, so that was very rewarding, but mostly it’s a topic I love, and I love to share it with people.
I was surprised the first time I taught it; I thought I was going to be introducing them to chemistry and that that was going to be the main focus, but actually a lot of them don’t know very much about food and about cooking. They’re freshmen, so most of them haven’t cooked very much on their own. The foods that they are used to varied a lot from one student to another, as well as the number of different foods they’re used to. A lot of them are used to just a pretty small subset of kinds of food, whether that’s one “ethnic” cuisine, or whether it’s just classic American meatloaf, hamburgers and fried chicken. […] The food was more of a revelation to them than the chemistry in a lot of ways. So that affects the focus of the class in certain ways, but that’s OK.
Katherine Kaiser, GA
Undergraduate Colleges