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ACF Food Science Course

We have partnered with the American Culinary Federation to produce a 40-hour introduction to food science course. This course teaches the fundamentals of food science and prepares you for more advanced courses which will be released later this year.
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Hello, and thank you for taking this course on food science! You don’t need to have a background in science or in cooking to do well in this course — just a passion for learning. The course was designed for food professionals, home cooks, scientists, non-scientist, or anyone who wants to have a better understanding of food and cooking.

We’ll cover food molecules — including how they are constructed and how they interact — heat, acids and bases, colors, flavors and aromas, flavor perception, cultural aspects of food, water, salts, sugars and starches, colloids, lipids, proteins, nutrition, sustainability, and fermentation. Needless to say, there’s a lot of information in this course.

Here’s just a little taste of what you learn about.

So, take your time and focus on the concepts rather than trying to memorize everything. Many themes are repeated throughout the course, and there’s an extensive glossery included in the first module.

No matter where you’re starting, if you study the material with intent, you’ll gain a great foundation in food science, impacting decisions that you make for cooking and baking, food preservation, nutrition, sustainability, taste and flavor perception, as well as an introduction to basic physics, organic chemistry, and biochemistry; and you’ll also get a glimpse into the wonders of the amazingly complex world that makes life, happiness, and soufflés possible.

So, I hope you enjoy taking this course. You’ll also find a number of resources and interviews at ChefsVillage.org and FoodScience.org and also on our YouTube channel. So, have fun, and we’ll see you in the next section where we start on the basics of food molecules.

This is a 40-hour, self-paced course on food science for food professionals, home cooks, scientists, non-scientists, or anyone who works with food and wants to understand what’s going on under the hood.

The ACF food science course is available here.

Overview

This online course represents over a thousand hours of curriculum development, including many improvements over years of teaching food science to food professionals, scientists, home cooks, and culinary and baking students.

The course covers many areas, including food molecules, heat, acids and bases, colors, flavors and aromas, flavor perception, water, salts, sugars and starches, colloids, lipids, proteins, fermentation, cultural aspects of food, nutrition, and sustainability. 

The knowledge you’ll gain through this course will help you understand food at a much deeper level, impacting decisions you make for cooking and baking, food preservation, nutrition, sustainability, taste and flavor perception, and along the way you might also pick up a bit of physics, organic chemistry, and biochemistry.

 

Areas Covered

By the end of this course, you will understand:

  • How food molecules are constructed and how and why they interact.
  • The different heat sources we use, transfer methods, properties of materials used to cook and bake, carryover cooking, and the many different meanings of “tempering.”
  • How acids and bases work, how they affect foods and cooking, and how we can use them to our advantage in preparing foods and for flavor profiles.
  • Functional groups and how they change the looks, smells, and tastes of foods.
  • The many ways we use baking soda and various acids in the kitchen.
  • What causes the different colors in foods, the changes to colors in foods, how to preserve and control colors, and how colors affect taste and nutrition.
  • Flavors and aromas in foods and why they are there.
  • Multisensory perception, cross-modal perception, and other fascinating topics.
  • Protein leverage and the post-ingestive effects of food.
  • All about water, solutions and solubility, osmosis, alcohol, specific heat, boiling point, vaporization, freezing, water activity, and food storage.
  • The many types of salts (including table salt), and how they change foods.
  • Sugars and Starches, including glucans, galactans, fructans, types and properties of sugar, sucrose, hydrocolloids, and the starch cycle.
  • Colloids, emulsions, foams, and gels.
  • Lipids, triglycerides, fats, phospholipids, waxes, terpenes, and steroids.
  • Proteins: structure, how they are formed, gluten, egg foams, transglutaminase, collagen, myosin, elastin, keratin, denaturation, enzymes, and more.
  • Nutrition, health, food safety, and sustainability.
  • Bacteria, yeasts, and fermentation in foods and in biology.