Science and Food at UCLA with Chef Alex Atala
Professor Amy Rowat leads a popular undergraduate course titled “Science and Food: The Physical and Molecular Origins of What We Eat” for UCLA’s Life Sciences program. The class offers students the chance to learn the origins of food texture and flavor – i.e. why lettuce is crispy, or why different cuts of meat have different textures.
The class is punctuated with course lectures by highly regarded chefs and farmers from Los Angeles and beyond. This year, for example, Chef Jeremy Fox will be giving a class lecture entitled “The Art of Vegetable Texture” and Chef Michael Voltaggio will be lecturing on “Meat Texture and Elasticity.”
Accompanying the class each spring is an evening lecture series that is open to the general public. Similar to Harvard’s “Science and Cooking” lectures, this series is presented for nominal ticket prices with the intent of introducing food science to those outside of the program.
Just last week, Alex Atala, the chef and owner of D.O.M. in São Paulo, Brazil, kicked off the 2013 public lecture series with a discussion on the intersection of the primitive with the modern. Once described by Chef David Chang as more interesting than the Dos Equis Most Interesting Man in the Word, Atala is renowned for a devotion to regional cuisine using indigenous Brazilian ingredients.
Atala works closely with anthropologists and scientists to discover and classify new foods from the Amazonian region. Among his favorite discoveries are priprioca, a fragrant Amazonian root used in savory and sweet dishes, and a new variety of wild palm perfectly adapted for sustainable and environmentally sound farming, which he serves as fettuccine with butter, sage, and popcorn powder (see recipe below).