Modules
Twelve teaching modules across four stages: measuring edible matter, then its structures, its transformations under cooking, and finally how to predict and design it.
This is the curriculum map: measurement leads to structure, structure to transformation, transformation to prediction and inverse design. Each stage assumes the vocabulary the last one built — read them in order the first time, then use the module pager and the links below each module to move forward or back once you know the ground. For the fuller telling of this same progression, with a specimen for each stage, see the course overview journey.
Stage 1 · Measuring Edible Matter
How a physical chemist looks at a food material: definitions, flow curves and thermal signatures.
What Is Edible Matter?
Framing the course's central claim — a food's texture is a measurable material property, not a matter of taste. Anchored on tapioca pearls.
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
Rheology I: Flow Behaviour
Why doubanjiang has to be pushed before it flows, and honey doesn't — Newtonian, power-law and Herschel-Bulkley models of shear flow.
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
Thermal Characterisation
Reading a braise as a heat-and-transition budget — specific heat, latent heat of transition, and what a thermal signature tells you about pork belly.
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
Stage 2 · Structures and Networks
What gives a food material its structure: gel networks, aggregated proteins, dispersed phases.
Polymer Networks I: Starch Gels
How liangpi goes from a pourable starch slurry to a sliceable sheet — gelatinisation, retrogradation, and the degree-of-gelatinisation model.
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
Protein Aggregation and Gelation
The moment soy milk becomes tofu — percolation, the gel point, and the Winter-Chambon criterion for when a liquid becomes a solid network.
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
Colloids and Emulsions
Why a long-simmered bone broth turns milky and stays that way — Stokes' law and what actually stabilises a food emulsion.
Week 6 · 29 March 2027
Stage 3 · Transport, Kinetics and Transformation
How that structure changes during cooking: transport, reaction kinetics and phase transitions.
Heat and Mass Transport
Why a xiaolongbao's filling is still cold when its wrapper is done — Fourier's law, the Biot number, and simultaneous heat and moisture transport.
Week 7 · 5 April 2027
Reaction Kinetics
Why Peking duck skin browns faster at a higher oven temperature than the temperature difference alone would suggest — the Arrhenius equation.
Week 8 · 19 April 2027
Phase Transitions in Cooking
What actually happens inside a youtiao as it deep-fries — a moving moisture front and a crust crossing its glass transition.
Week 9 · 26 April 2027
Stage 4 · Prediction and Material Design
Fitting models to data, mapping a design space, and inverting the problem to engineer a texture.
Building Predictive Models
Fitting the Virtual Rheometer's models to noisy data — least squares, residuals, and how to tell a good model fit from a lucky one.
Week 10 · 3 May 2027
The Crispness Design Space
Mapping temperature and moisture onto glassy, rubbery, crisp and softened regions — the state diagram behind why crackers go stale.
Week 11 · 10 May 2027
Inverse Material Design
Given a target texture, work backward through the course's models to choose a formulation and process — the capstone design problem.
Week 12 · 17 May 2027