Welcome to this class of The Science of Gastronomy. I'm King Chow from HKUST. So when you enroll in this particular couse you must be expecting that we're going to teach you how to cook delicious dishes. But let me remind you this course's focus is on the science. So, hopefully in this course we're going to introduce to you all the nitty-gritty about the science component, that how we practice it in the kitchen. Now lets look at why we start cooking. Now, if you look at the history when did we start cooking? We always say that it's roughly between like a 2 million years ago or 300,000 years ago, that we start cooking. Why, because we have obtained archaeological evidence with all these artifacts illustrating that people at that time, in fact, we start using fire. And, we have cooking pots and all these things. So, that means roughly that time, we start cooking. But then we also need to ask ourselves, how are you different from a dog or a cat, horse or a cow? Horse and cows they eat vegetables, grasses, leaves. Dogs and cats they eat meat. So what are we? We are omnivores, we eat everything. So how's it different? How's it affecting our evolution. How cooking food by itself is helping us. Think about that. Do you know how much energy a dog would use for their normal function? Particularly for their brain. The reality is that they only spend about 5% of their energy for their brain to maintain their function. But how about human being? We normally use about 20 to 25%, so basically if we want to think, we are using a lot of energy. So, the ability to be able to use food, cook food specifically, to allow us to capture the energy, to allow us to digest very effectively. And utilize nutrients to support ourself, to support our development, that's very important. So, that's what happened and how it comes to human being. For human being that's what we are, we utilize our brain a lot. And being able to cook foods in fact give us the advantage to capture more energy to support the development of our brain. So you look at this particular diagram illustrating on the left-hand side is the apes, on the right hand-side that's the hominid of a human being. You may recognize that if you look at the chimpanzees, in fact the skull they have a very different shape. Look at the brain, the brain is relatively small. But then they have a really bulging jaws coming out, because they use it for eating and hunting. For human being we have a relatively flat face, but then our brain is relatively much larger in proportion. So, that's how we are. And, what happened is that in fact after all this apes they start to develop this ability to eat cooked food. That's another element that come into play and in fact our relative apes they are also developing too. For example in this case the chimpanzee. You may recognize that this chimpanze is like munching some of the soil after they eat some of the plants. well what happened is that because the mixture of this soil together with plants results in the generation of some anti-malarial compound. So in fact it helped them to cure disease and infection. Now, so therefore, food or the ability to eat food in a very specific way is more than just for the nutrients. Sometimes is for the health and later on we may find that becomes something like culture. Same thing happened to the bonobo. But they have is that developed skills. They want to eat the termites so what to they do? They put their saliva on the stick so that they pop into the cave where the termites are there. And they will be able to pull out and stick those termites out so that they can eat them. So, the ability to use this stick become a skill again the skill become culture too. Not just about the apes. Think about elephant. Look at this African elephant. In fact, sometimes we notice that this elephant, they would go into the cave. At the time of rainy seasons when all the plants that are running short of minerals. What they do is they go into the cave and they eat the salt directly because they want to recapture the mineral which is missing in their regular diet. Again, that becomes culture. Now having all this, we also recognize animals like the sea otter. They are eating abalone and clams. They develop this ability, they would be like floating on the water and putting all the food in front of them. Again, it is a very unique culture that they develop. So, therefore in this course we are going to cover all the science behind it. But we are also going to cover some aspect of the culture and techniques that we use for the cooking. And in order to know more about that we need to understand a little bit of the geographical location where the food is from. What kind of culture the people there have. And that help us to understand. So, collectively I think there are few important element. We want to understand how the culinary process are being done in different places. We want to know how to use certain method or technique, or tools, so that we can make good food and make improvement. And, of course, with all these, we would be able to invent our own new dishes. Now, most important of all is that we would now be able to learn about all the different culture. We can mix different kind of food. And we can use different kind of techniques, and combine them all together. And most important of all, we understand that cooking. The first rule of them is that we need to use fresh and good food, to start with. And of course we need to know how to cook them, so what kind of utensil? How to transfer the heat so you can get them cooked? And we need to have a basic understanding of the raw material, the food, the characteristic. How they contact heat, how they get cooked very easily. And of course we want to control the texture of the food. The flavor the taste and how to mix them together. And of course, at the end we want to have good food. And there are psychological aspect of it that how do we get stimulated by good food, the good taste, the good smell. And whether we should have them constantly or we should have them once a while. And most important of all, again, is that we need to be very critical about what way the people are practicing cooking. Sometimes, there's no expert in any single field. And we simply need to learn about the rationale behind it, and we can modify it accordingly. And as a science aspect, we need to focus on experimenting. So, I hope that you'll be able to experiment it at home in your kitchen. To learn about trying how to mix different kinds of food, with different kinds of cooking techniques together. And if you keep a good record that is like a laboratory logbook. And you learn from the experience. I hope at the end you will have fun in this course. And at the end you will be able to cook a few good dishes for yourself and your family members or your loved one. Now in this course, I'm going to tell you a lot about these theory things. But we also going to demonstrate to you some of the scientific principles, with that I need to have my assistants, Leo and Angel. And they going to be with me, helping me to do some experiment in front of the video. So that you can understand better about how the science is being practiced in the kitchen.
