Science and gastronomi

I'm spending my holiday doing another Coursera MOOC. This one is from Hong Kong University for technology and science, and it is absolutely great. I signed up for it, because I wanted to do it with my daughter to maintain her "science thinking" during the holiday. She is quite interested in cooking, but not so much in science.

Now after having finished the second of the six weeks we are both very engaged in the course. It explains the science behind and around food, cooking, perception of taste so well and we both learned a lot. I have got so many new ideas for my future science classes. We have to do several experiments at home and send the results to the university. These experiments are very easy, illustrative and most of all interesting and funny. And it gives us plenty of ideas to experiment on in the kitchen. This week we learned about smell influence on your taste of perception. Etc how vanilla makes you think you taste sweetness. Last week we learned how tastes can suppress each other etc sweetness suppress bitterness. So in theory the smell of vanilla would make things taste less bitter. I always drink my coffee with a lot of sugar to make it less bitter. I would like to use less sugar. So I will experiment with adding vanilla flavor to my coffee. 

In the screen dump below you see one of the experiments we have to do this week: do the smell influence the taste of potato chips? I guess you can see, why we are having fun doing these assignments :)

So even though the first deadline for assignments was a few days ago, I can only recommend everybody with an interest in food, eating, recipes, cooking or science to pass by King, Lam, Leo and the rest of the team in https://www.coursera.org/course/scigast