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Written by Editorial Team
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Thursday, 30 April 2009 20:01 |
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Page 1 of 5
 Professor Paul Blowers of the University of Arizona has taken the art of cooking into the classroom setting, creating a teaching tool that opens the field of chemical engineering to an ever-wider audience. As a creative effort and a propagation of scientific advancement, Professor Blowers’ unique teaching program presents advanced scientific concepts using familiar food preparation techniques, blending science and art in an inspiring teaching initiative.
You have undertaken a teaching initiative to inspire interest in and understanding of chemical engineering. What has been the inspiration behind using cooking as a teaching tool for such a complex subject?
There are a few separate reasons for cooking and food being good access points for introducing chemical engineering concepts. My parents always asked me what I was learning when I was an undergrad. Since neither had much technical training or mathematics backgrounds, I had a hard time explaining esoteric topics such as heat transfer, mass transfer, transport phenomena, and kinetics. I started trying to bridge what they were already familiar with and advanced scientific ideas. Heat transfer became how to predict the length of time it takes to bake a potato, mass transfer became why one does not make Jello shots with alcohol in the pot when heating, transport phenomena became why one grinds coffee beans and then heats the water up to make coffee, kinetics became why it takes a while to make bread from scratch and why it cannot be done quicker (without a bread machine).
The next reason is that everyone eats. Students eat all kinds of things, admittedly often beer, pizza, and ramen noodles, but you can start with descriptions of how one ferments beer to get at so many different ideas in chemical engineering. You can use almost any food to center a discussion on a new topic! Also, every food, other than organic home-grown foods, is going to have been touched by some chemical engineering aspect at some point, from planting seeds through ending up on your table. Bananas are often shipped underripe and then ripened rapidly with ethylene gas close to the point of sale. Seeds are often coated with fungicidal chemicals to prevent their premature destruction. If the foods are processed in any way or shipped, you need chemical engineers to create the process. Discussing all these links reminds students of the importance of our field and how many lives we touch, even for "simple" products such as potato chips.
Finally, I love food and I love to cook. I had a roommate once in grad school that made an observation about an improvisational recipe I was creating, that I should dice the ingredient small for a wide distribution and overall flavor, but dice it larger if I wanted people to say, "Wow! This has XXX in it!" It was such fundamental chemical engineering centered on the basic ideas of how matter behaves, that I just keep thinking about these ideas, even now.
Can the knowledge of chemical processes and the effects of various ingredients improve one’s culinary skills?
There are so many ways to go with this question that I'll again pick a few. I guess if you talk to professors often you find that there are always many answers to the same question :)
Let us think about canning for a minute as an extreme example of improving culinary skills. If you do it wrong, you die. I make homemade ketchup, corn relish, salsa, jelly, and other things somewhat often as I do not like many of the products on the market for either their price or their ingredient list, which has many things I'm not necessarily willing to put into my body. There are combinations of pH (acidity) and temperature that kill and prevent the growth of bacteria, such as that which causes botulism. If you know the food chemistry and acidity and can achieve the right temperatures for the right amount of time, you don't have to worry about killing your parents when you send them a jar of corn relish for Christmas. You know that when they and you eat the product, you will all be safe. Even sterilizing the jars and lids and equipment in the dishwasher involving hot water and steam is all about knowing the physics and how to do things more efficiently. I find using the dishwasher on the hot temperature cycle allows me to begin canning and do everything simultaneously, so that I minimize the amount of time it takes to get everything done.
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