Week 1: Opening Lecture: Why Treat Food as a Material

The course's central claim — texture is a measurable material property — and how the four-stage curriculum builds toward testing it.

22 February 2027

Outline#

• The claim this course makes: “QQ,” “crisp,” and “chewy” are not vague adjectives — each names a specific, measurable material property, and this course spends twelve weeks building the tools to name which one.
• Why Chinese cooking specifically: a wide range of material states (hydrogel, glass, emulsion, crystalline fat) appear across a small, well-known set of dishes, making it an unusually efficient teaching corpus for soft-matter physics.
• The four-stage shape of the course and why it runs in this order: measure first (Stage 1), then ask what gives a material its structure (Stage 2), then how that structure changes under cooking (Stage 3), and only then whether the whole chain can be run backward to design a target texture (Stage 4).
• What “honest modelling” means in this course, and why it is marked explicitly: every quantitative claim states whether it is measured, literature-derived, or a labelled illustrative estimate.
• Introduction to the Laboratory Portfolio’s two instruments (the Virtual Rheometer and the Crispness Phase Diagram), used across the course rather than built fresh for each module.
• What to do before Module 1: no preparation beyond the prerequisites in the course overview.