UCLA students dig into the physics of food – latimes.com
A class at UCLA teaches all about the science behind what makes lettuce crispy, coffee bitter, and apple pie truly tasty.
The three undergrads looked warily at the pulverized apples in their bowl.
The would-be pastry chefs had planned to drop dollops of the mixture into a chemical bath, creating fruity spheres with a filmy skin and an oozing interior. Their early attempts left a lot to be desired. The apple mush was bland, like baby food. The finished globules were teardrop-shaped rather than round. And they were chewy, like aging Jell-O.
“It needs sugar,” Amirari Diego said, with a sigh.
Diego and his two buddies, Stephen Phan and Kevin Yang, were playing with their food for the sake of science — and their transcripts.
They’re students in Physiological Sciences 7 (that would be Science & Food to you and me), a class at UCLA that teaches all about the physics that make lettuce crispy, meat chewy and dough springy; the molecules that make coffee bitter, and carrots sweet.