In 2022, I wrote a Duke Energy STEM grant proposal to provide our students the opportunity to connect STEM subjects with wok cookery.
At the Panda Express near our school, a customer dropping by around 2:30PM each afternoon will find themselves waiting behind 20-30 high school students, each queued up for their “fix:” fried rice, mongolian beef, orange chicken, and the like. What most of these students do not know is there is an enormous amount of science, technology, and engineering behind the ancient foods they love, and a growing movement to produce these items in a more sustainable way. The “Science of Panda Express” is a problem-solving, project-based learning activity that challenges students to explore, become comfortable with, and master the STEM subjects which enable great chefs to reproduce Chinese wok cooking in an environmentally sustainable manner. The project? Apply STEM to the foods they love. The problem? How to recreate wok cooking without the use of gas or nonrenewable resources.
The underlying philosophy is simple: awaken an appreciation for the science, engineering, math, and technology that goes into cooking Chinese food by having students figure out how to use induction burners to recreate the environment of high-temperature gas ranges. To do this, during in-class and after-school sessions, they will follow the work of physicist and chef Kenji López-Alt, exploring the world of metallurgy and thermodynamics, seeing how different metals transfer energy differently. They will explore the research of chemist Louis-Camille Maillard and the reaction of amino acids and sugars under high heat, then experiment with Maillard’s work themselves. They will seek to understand Foucault currents, how these are generated and transferred to the cooking surface, and apply that knowledge to practical use. They will need to explore gelatinization, sugar reactivities, and how all these things work together in the “velveting process,” mitigating the damaging effects of high-heat cooking. The will learn to use micromeasurements to control the changing environment of the wok to make the foods they love.
Universities like Harvard have followed this approach because teaching students to make and evaluate food INHERENTLY provides them the opportunity to think scientifically, explore technology, and learn about food, sustainable agriculture, and culinary engineering applications. While they are “playing” with woks, they will become comfortable with the universally applicable science, technology, math, and engineering skills they will need for any STEM field.
