The Experimental Cuisine Collective’s February 2012 meeting will center around The Kitchen as Laboratory: Reflections on the Science of Food and Cooking (Columbia University Press, 2012). The editors and authors—chefs, scientists, and hybrids thereof—make a case for science inspired by the kitchen, where culinary knowledge is advanced by testing hypotheses rooted in the physical and chemical properties of foods. Using traditional and cutting-edge tools, ingredients, and techniques, the contributors to this unique anthology create, and sometimes revamp, dishes that respond to specific desires and serve up an original encounter with gastronomic practice.

From the seemingly mundane grilled cheese sandwich, pizza, and soft-boiled egg to Turkish ice cream, sugar glasses, and jellified beads, the essays in The Kitchen as Laboratory cover the chemistry, physics, history, and culture of a wide range of culinary creations. Editor-in-Chief César Vega, PhD, will discuss the motivations, contents, and anecdotes behind the making of The Kitchen as Laboratory, looking at science just as much as gastronomy. He will be joined by contributors Arielle Johnson (UC Davis) and Tom Tongue (IFP), who will present the research featured in their respective chapters.

Michael J Cirino is the voice and creative director of the culinary performance art group a razor, a shiny knife, which hosts educational, social and theatrical experiences. The group produces events around the world that push the boundaries of what is possible and expected to happen around a kitchen and table. For the past five years, Mr. Cirino has sought to redefine the guest/host relationship and create a space in the culinary world for a different paradigms of social interaction around food that fits outside of the restaurant and home kitchen. This conversation will explore the traditional roles of the host and the guest, the rewards that each role seeks to obtain, and start a conversation on how we can all take these roles and pervert them into something ridiculous and inspiring.

ECC co-founder and self-styled “Outlaw of Pastry” Will Goldfarb is currently the executive pastry chef of KU DE TA, Bali.  Chef Goldfarb owns and operates Willpowder and Willequipped, and has been making desserts for nearly 15 years.  In his (ideally) non-pretentious talk, Planet One: School for Boys (and Girls), Mr. Goldfarb will discuss the creative narrative from the 2011 season of dessert making, and its evolution from 2010′s Planet Zero.  This is a detailed, behind-the-scene look at the research, development, and execution of a slightly off-balance but very well intentioned pastry chef.

On November 30, Prof. Dana Small, who runs Yale University’s Affective Sensory Neuroscience Laboratory and is also an associate professor of psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine and an associate professor of psychology at Yale University, will give a presentation titled The Flavor Modality. In her own words: “When we ‘taste,’we also touch the food or drink in our mouths and sense its odor via retronasal olfaction. The term flavor describes this multimodal experience. The aim of this lecture will be to describe how the independent sensations of taste, touch and smell converge to create unitary flavor percepts and how, through experience, the brain encodes these ‘flavor objects’and their associated physiological significance. Psychophysical and neuroimaging data will be presented to support the existence of a binding mechanism, possibly residing in the somatomotor mouth area, that underlies illusory processes that bring taste, touch and smell into a common spatial and temporal field. Activation of this mechanism then allows flavor objects that reside in the insular cortex to become associated with the post-ingestive consequences of feeding, which then drives flavor preference formation.”

Click here for Chef Yosses’PowerPoint presentation.

In his October 15 presentation, The Prism of Flavors, Pastry Chef Bill Yosses will focus on emulsions, foams, and gels to discuss how he seeks to better understand ingredients and techniques. As he takes us from the beginning of cooking to today’s technology, he will also demonstrate recipes that illustrate the principles driving his pastry work.

Chef Yosses, author of The Perfect Finish, joined the White House in 2007. There, his role also includes beekeeping and gardening, in line with First Lady Michelle Obama’s efforts to promote healthy eating. During his outstanding career in New York restaurants, he ran the pastry kitchens of Josephs Citarella, Bouley, Tavern on the Green, and Montrachet. Click here for a 2010 New York Times profile.

He will be joined by Najat Kaanache, a stagiaire from elBulli who is now traveling around the world demonstrating some of the groundbreaking techniques from the restaurant. She has also staged at The French Laundry, Per Se, Alinea, and Noma.

The June meeting of the Experimental Cuisine Collective will take place on Wednesday, June 15, from 4 to 6 p.m. at NYU.

In his presentation, The Color of Meat (Put a Smoke Ring On It), ECC co-founder and NYU chemistry professor Kent Kirshenbaum will examine the origin of color in meat. What gives a steak its distinctive red color? How reliable is color for determining freshness? Why does meat change color when it is cooked? We will evaluate methods for manipulating meat color. To seal the deal, we will investigate barbecue and the mysterious smoke ring.

NEW YORK, May 1, 2011—The Experimental Cuisine Collective, an interdisciplinary group founded to examine the properties, boundaries, and conventions of food, celebrates its fourth anniversary with a day-long symposium, “Experimental Cuisine: Foundation to Innovation,” on Monday, May 16, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at NYU.

Speakers are Prof. Charles Zuker of Columbia University; David Arnold, director of technology at the French Culinary Institute and author of the blog Cooking Issues; chefs Maxime Bilet, co-author of Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, and Grant Crilly, one of the book’s development chefs; and Michael Laiskonis, executive pastry chef at Le Bernardin. Jeffrey Steingarten, food critic at Vogue and one of the first people to write about experimental cooking, will be the day’s MC. Lisa Abend, author of The Sorcerer’s Apprentices: A Season in the Kitchen at Ferran Adria’s elBulli, will moderate a roundtable among the speakers.

Admission to the symposium, which will take place at Lipton Hall (108 W. Third Street), is free, but RSVPs are mandatory. Click here to register and for a full program.