stephen, 21, male, 5 ft. 6 in. of awesome.
Chef David Chang of the Momofuku empire gave a talk at Harvard University as a part of the Science & Cooking lecture series sponsored by their School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which also included talks from major players in the food world like Grant Achatz, Wylie Dufresne and Ferran Adria. He talks about how chefs are trying to understand the organisms and processes associated with age-old cooking techniques like fermentation and pickling, and how he is using this understanding to make soy sauce and miso in his “lab”. Imagine sitting down at a restaurant and reading the menu only to find beneath the wine pairing, “Inoculated with Aspergillus oryzae (or inevitably, whichever particular bacteria/fungus is in fashion)”. It’s already pretty cool that the audience was told that what they were eating was mold and that they willingly ate it.
The video is about an hour long and sadly the mise en place, if you will, on the table is never used.
