Justin Miller is a chemist who has taught at Hobart and William Smith Colleges since 2004. He graduated from Princeton and went on to M.I.T. for his Ph.D. In addition to regularly teaching Organic Chemistry at the Colleges, he serves as one of the key faculty for students interested in the Health Professions. Justin has recently begun to teach a course which focuses on food and, of course, that's why the interview appears below!
Bibliochef: So, let’s begin with the basics! I know that you have taught (and will be teaching again) a chemistry course that focuses on food. Can you describe the course and let us know how you came to be teaching it?
Justin: The course is called Bonding with Food—incidentally, a name that my wife Julianne thought up. Sometimes I think I should have included an ellipsis between Bonding and with to accentuate the double entendre. What I think makes the course special is that two semesters of organic chemistry are required as prerequisites: it’s meant to be a hard-core look at chemical processes in the kitchen-as-laboratory. With students who truly understand organic structure and mechanism, we can cover the basics—proteins, carbs, and fats—in about 10 minutes. Then the learning really begins.
My path to this course began in grad school, when my roommate chastised me for storing my chicken soup in a Ball jar that didn’t fit it…after it had expanded in the freezer. “It’s a colloid,” he said “so of course it expands when you freeze it. Didn’t you learn anything in general chemistry?” This from a future cantor who used to sing “ ’C’ is for credit, that’s good enough for me…” Then a couple of years later another friend of mine told me about the Food Network. I mocked the idea. Come on, a whole TV network dedicated to food? How could you possibly fill the broadcast schedule? At the time, the hot show was Iron Chef—the original, Japanese version dubbed in English. Who’d want to watch people cook?
But then I got cable, and began watching, fascinated. I had known essentially nothing about food chemistry, but found that a Ph.D. in organic chemistry really helped me understand the concepts on shows like Alton Brown’s Good Eats. I learned, experimented a little in my own kitchen, and spent the next 10 years picking up little tidbits here and there. When I mentioned to some students a couple of years ago that I was thinking of developing a food chemistry course, they were very excited. So I did it.
Bibliochef: What a wonderful tale! So, what did students read for the course? (I admit I am a fan of Harold McGee’s book as well as Herve This on molecular gastronomy. In fact, I reviewed a book by This and called it possibly the best food book ever. Anyway, I am always looking for more!) Will they read the same things the next time you teach it?
Justin: McGee (On Food and Cooking) was essentially our textbook. We read and watched some of Alton Brown’s work, and we used Shirley Corriher’s Cookwise and Bakewise. There was also a scholarly review article in the journal Accounts of Chemical Research (2008) by This, along with a bunch of other offerings from the primary chemical literature. And we ended the course with some culture and policy discussion based in part on Michael Pollan’s books The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food.
Until someone comes up with something better than McGee’s book (not likely, I think), we’ll use that one every time. Alton Brown has set the standard with his accessible, scientific approach to food, so I don’t see dropping that content, either. Corriher is well known in the Food and Agriculture division of the American Chemical Society and also as “the chemist” on Good Eats, so her offerings are appropriately scientific for my class. I’ll try to stir the pot (ha!) with new primary literature, and the Pollan books, excellent as they are, may be too well known even by students to be worth the space on the reading list.
Bibliochef: As a chemistry course, I assume there are labs. Can you tell us some about those?
Justin: I think my favorite may have been the first. I bought (ok, my wife bought) a large shoulder roast from the kosher butcher in Rochester. We cut it into 7 or 8 pieces and then cooked each piece differently. Braised, roasted, nuked, pan seared in a cast iron skillet, grilled, some of these both with and without brining first. Besides the fact that the beautifully medium-rare grilled and pan-seared versions were absolutely delicious, we found something shocking: the nuked version wasn’t the worst! The braised piece lacked both flavor and texture.
We also tried our hands at bread, pizza, light and dark roux, mayonnaise and hollandaise sauces, caramel, and a host of others. One day we extracted colors from various fruits and veggies to determine whether they were oil- or water-soluble. Then we played with the colors by varying the pH using vinegar and baking soda. That was just plain fun. True blue colors from food are rare, but we managed it that day.
I should also mention the eggs we cooked in an immersion circulator. By cooking a dozen eggs to precisely controlled increasing final temperatures, we were able to see and feel as various egg proteins coagulated. I forget which was my favorite—the 65 °C egg? 71 °C? But I look forward to rediscovering which one I like best when I teach the course again this coming spring.
Bibliochef: I know the course had a blog – how did that come about? Did they sustain it after the course was over? Will you use it again?
Justin: If you want to see the results of the experiments I just described, plus a bunch more, check out the blog: bondingwithfood.wordpress.com
We haven’t added to it since we finished the course over a year ago, but we will use it again for the next iteration of the course. It was a slow starter, but once it got going, it was excellent. One of my students (Megan, here’s the credit you richly deserve) was instrumental in getting this thing off the ground, and once she set the bar, everyone else matched it. We have a wonderful record of the course from the students’ points of view. I so enjoyed the vast majority of the posts, and the effort that went into them was tremendous. I want to point out particularly the one called “Adventures in Cooking and Emulsions: How I Could Have Saved My Valentine’s Day Dinner.” It’s a nice story, and gives a good flavor (ugh) for the kinds of things we learned in class.
Bibliochef: What’s the most surprising thing you learned while teaching the course?
Justin: Students are perceptive. I knew that already, I suppose, but this was a showcase. We all had a great time in the class, but during the assessments, they identified the biggest weaknesses of the course—the same ones I also identified. Because it was a new course, I had to choose which aspects of the course to develop; the written assignments drew the short straw, and weren’t as well developed as they will be in future iterations. Suffice it to say, they noticed. And good for them! They also wanted more orgo earlier in the course, which makes sense because the students who took the course were generally the ones who enjoyed orgo. I knew that the orgo component wasn’t what it could have been, so they were correct. What surprised me is that they missed it, and wanted more!
Bibliochef: It is amazing how much you accomplished in the course. What did you have to leave out of the course that you wish you could have included?
Justin: Beer. Wine. Alcohol in general. No time, and besides, with the age range in the class, actually serving these in class could have been problematic, especially given that some students drove to my house for the class.
Bibliochef: If you imagined someone walking into your class – alive or dead, potential student or guest speaker, who might that be? Why?
Justin: I’d love to be able to see myself as an undergraduate student in class. I was not the ideal student in college. Though I did well enough, I rarely studied, I almost never took notes, and I did…some of the reading, sometimes even most of it. (Should I be fessing up in this forum? Oh, well.) I wonder how difficult I’d find it to reach…well, me at that age, long before I had any serious interest in food, except that I ate a lot of it. (I counted over 4,500 calories a day in high school.)
Bibliochef: Hmmm. Never thought of that. Wonder if I'd have been able to reach myself as a student. . . If you could take a field trip with students anywhere in the world (and maybe any time in history) where would you go? Why?
Justin: Japan…or France…or Italy…or Mexico, Brazil, Israel, or really anywhere with a cuisine. Come on, you’re going to make me choose? The word “cuisine” seems to be a lost concept in this melting pot of a country we live in, though it may be making a comeback with locavore movements. Wherever our trip took us, I wouldn’t necessarily focus on big cities, though I’d want to stop in. It’s the regional food that’s truly rooted in tradition, and where silent chemical connections played a part in evolving diets. We could talk about the chemistry unique to each cuisine as we ate our way through. What a great trip that would be.
Bibliochef: Cruel to make you choose I know! So, do you eat differently – at home or in restaurants – as a result of the course? Do your students?
Justin: I think so, yes. We did a unit on junk food. The clerk in the checkout line saw the absolutely horrible items on the belt for that unit, and commented to my wife, “Boy, I’d like to come over to your place tonight!” One of the items claimed to have “No high fructose corn syrup!” But it listed corn syrup, dextrose, sucrose, glucose…and fructose. Should be illegal. It’s not even that fructose is necessarily that bad (glucose is the bad one); it’s just false advertising.
We still eat junk food, of course, but we try more than before to make it ourselves. Ice cream’s great, but you should try my sour cherry vanilla or sour cherry chocolate. Or caramel, or mocha. We make it from scratch with cream, sugar, vanilla extract, Dutch-process cocoa powder, and fruit. And liquid nitrogen! It’s decadent. And for cookies, I’ll sometimes make meringues with the egg whites left over from when my wife bakes challah. Lemon-ginger-white chocolate meringues are spectacular, though not for everyone. My kids prefer plain vanilla or chocolate chip.
But we’ve always cooked most of our big meals from scratch. My wife and I were brought up that way, and we’ve always wanted the same for our kids.
As for the students…time will tell. The class surely had an impact on them, but the bottom line was never prescriptive. My goal was to afford them the ability to gather unbiased information, learn, and make decisions for themselves. The “correct” answer to so many questions is “It depends…”
Bibliochef: What’s your favorite chemical reaction related to food? Would you share a related recipe?
Justin: The Maillard reaction. It’s ubiquitous—pretty much any food that browns at high temperature that isn’t pure sugar is undergoes this reaction. It’s the source of what Alton Brown calls “golden brown and delicious.” You don’t need a recipe for it, just stick a piece of meat on the grill, or in a hot pan, or under the broiler for a spectacular example. There are lots more ways to get this one going. But let’s face it, it’s awesome. [Editor's intrusion: if you want to see what this is about from Justin's blog, click here]
The following recipe comes mostly from my mother, though for the last few years the only time we’ve done it is together, and it’s evolved slightly from what she used to do. For steak or lamb chops, gather:
fresh peeled garlic
table salt (not kosher salt)
freshly ground pepper
olive oil (extra virgin here would be a waste of money)
(rosemary for the lamb, fresh or dried, chopped very fine)
Sorry, I don’t have measurements, just experiment a little and do it “to taste.” In a mortar, pound the garlic and salt to a pulp (the table salt here acts as an abrasive). Add the pepper, olive oil, and rosemary (for the lamb). The result should be thick and viscous. Rub the mixture liberally onto both sides of the meat, then grill over a very hot flame to medium rare. Charcoal is best, but to be honest, I usually use a gas grill because it’s so easy. If you don’t clean your drip pan, when its contents ignite (from dripping fat) they may provide some of the flavor you’d get from a charcoal grill. I try to do this on purpose. Flare-ups are good, just don’t let the meat catch fire. Pair with a glass of your favorite red wine, and drink a toast to Louis Camille Maillard.
Bibliochef: Sounds tasty. And I never knew who the reaction was named after. Thanks. And now for some of the questions I ask all of the people I “speak” with! What’s the absolutely best meal you have ever had? What made it the best meal?
Justin: That’s easy: Mama’s Fish House, on the Hana Highway in Maui, HI. They generate a new menu every day based on the fish caught that day. Each dish on the menu lists the fish, the boat that hauled it in, and the person who caught it. When we indicated that we didn’t want to have shellfish, the waiter spoke with the chef, who suggested several substitutions that the waiter then ran by us. My favorite dish, the appetizer involved a combination of Japanese, South American, and Hawai’ian influenced fish preparation. Ono (Hawai’ian snapper, which translated directly means delicious, is also known as wahoo) was served in raw cubes with coconut water and citrus. Mixed also with other fruit, it called to mind a sort of quick ceviche that was (intentionally) not allowed to develop, thus preserving the texture of the raw fish. Cooked ono has the texture of cooked chicken, though it looks white and has a much more delicate flavor. But this raw ono had a texture similar to that of canned jellied cranberry, with the same sort of melt-in-your-mouth feel that coats your tongue. The accompaniments brought out the subtle, fresh flavor of the fish. It was presented in half a raw coconut, which had flesh that was easily scooped out using the teaspoon it came with. I paired it with a very slightly salty drink containing coconut milk, mint and lime.
I have spent the last five years looking for any fish preparation nearly as good as this one, with no success. The sun set over the ocean as we ate. I dream of going back to Mama’s Fish House with my wife armed only with a credit card and several hours. Seriously. Real dreams from which I wake up feeling content.
Bibliochef:What music, films, books related to food and/or distilled products would you recommend? Why?
Justin: I’ll stick with a classic (and one I mentioned before): On Food and Cooking, by Harold McGee. He’s a journalist with a literature degree, yet he gets things right that even the scientists seem to miss. The chemistry is impeccably detailed and correct, yet still somehow accessible. For the other items, I don’t like making recommendations: de gustibus non est disputandum.
Bibliochef: What do you eat for comfort food?
Justin: Whatever it is, it’s usually a lot. To me, that’s comforting.
Bibliochef: Do you have a favorite restaurant in the Finger Lakes?
Justin: Corny, perhaps, but nothing beats Julianne’s (my wife's) cooking. Our food is not gourmet, it’s homey. But we’ve fed students, job candidates, and of course family, and these meals are the best. Maybe that’s partly the atmosphere at home, but it’s also because we know how we like our food. I know that Julianne likes her hollandaise really lemony. And she knows just how to add blue cheese to a recipe, even though she doesn’t like it. For what it’s worth, our meals are best when one of our friends who knows wine brings some—we sometimes dine with scientists who specialize in grapes. Our friends have exquisite taste.
But if you’re looking for a restaurant, try Rio Tomatlan in Canandaigua. Best Mexican food around, the flautas with tomatillo salsa are excellent. Aside from the mole, which is way too sweet, everything we’ve had there has been wonderful.
Bibliochef: What am I not asking that I should? What question have you never been asked that you have always wanted to be asked? What's your answer?
Justin: Here are a few:
Q: “What’s it like trying to teach a food chemistry course in a kosher kitchen?”
A: As long as you’re ok with avoiding certain ingredients, it’s not that big of a deal. I can’t think of any broad concepts that absolutely must be taught using non-kosher ingredients. Let’s just say that we didn’t butter the steak, or braise it in milk.
Q: “What’s it like to have over a dozen students storm your kitchen once a week for a semester?”
A: It’s tough on my family, though it’s nice for students to see them and even get to know them. The house, and particularly the kitchen, needed to be cleaned before each class, and then after the class left we had to clean up immediately in order to make dinner for the kids. But it was great to have a nice three-hour food experience once a week in my own home. I’d say something like, “I’d gladly do it again,” but I’ve already committed to it this coming spring semester, 2012. I am looking forward to it.
Bibliochef: Thanks so much for doing this. I learned a lot and really enjoyed this. I know readers will as well. And I look forward to the next group of students' work on the blog! Tell them to drop by here and leave their comments too!
