Science and Cooking Lecture: Ferran Adria, Jose Andres, and Harold McGee!!!

Need I say more??? Look at this lineup: Ferran Adria, Jose Andres, and Harold McGee!!!

I’m so so so happy that I got into this amazing lecture.

Harvard University organized the first ever course on Science & Cooking in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Of the 800 undergraduate students interested, only 400 won the lottery to enroll. The course is rooted in hard science but inspires through the lens of culinary achievements. Each week a renounced chef guest lectures a topic and us lucky Boston residents are invited to a mirroring free public lecture. Today was the kick-off.

I just found out about it this afternoon, got super excited, but quickly saddened to see  a “SOLD OUT” sign plastered across the ticketing option. However, some events are worth the gamble of a waiting list. I showed up 45 minutes prior to the talk and anxiously fretted the already 15+ line formed outside. This was probably the closest I ever came close to groupie behavior. And I’d do it all over again.

I’ve been worshiping Harold McGee (James Beard Award winning author of On Food & Cooking: The Science & Lore of the Kitchen) for years. His writing miraculously blends together food basics, cooking methods, history, anecdotes, and multi-discplinary sciences. It is the most lucid treatment of scientific material that remains accessible without dumbing all the way down to CNN-level (pop science). Thank you for this seminal work, McGee! It was especially gratifying to find him equally eloquent in oratory skills as on the written page. The only problem is, now that I’ve got my copy of his book autographed, I’m tempted to museum-display it for good.

And to be in the same room with Ferran Adria??? That’s like going to a “water-to-wine” demo if you were Jesus’ contemporary. elBulli receives 2 million reservation requests per year but accommodates only 8,000 diners during the 6-months the restaurant opens to service. No repeating of menus and each dish is meticulously researched, tested, and tweaked. If anyone’s heard of the term molecular gastronomy, it was Ferran Adria and his team at elBulli that put it on the map. We are actually coming up to a molecular gastronomy fatigue; many people are relegating the category to over-exposure, or worse, irrelevance. Admittedly, I myself haven’t been gaga about the trend despite people’s assumptions. However, after today’s lecture, I’m completely in awe of the genius that is Ferran Adria. This man is a visionary! elBulli is now transitioning into a new phase away from food-production focus and will be devoted to full-time culinary creativity instead. Adria explains that his goal is to “help teach people to think and to create in the right way.” There is such a thing as misguided experimentation masked as creativity and his goal is to provide a platform for avant-garde talents to move the field forward based on science. This dialogue isn’t new but formalized discourse at the leading academic institution of the world certainly is.

Jose Andres, himself a leading chef of our time credited for bringing tapas to America, translated for Adria’s Catalonian tongue and expertly helped paced the lengthy lecture with humor. Demos by two of his chefs from DC were also very thoughtfully designed. Capping the night were free bottles of Estrella Damm Inedit beer and book signings. This was truly a world-class event.