From the first meeting of the industrial design class he took this fall, Zhiye Lin knew he was at a disadvantage. The other 10 students were experienced cooks. Mr. Lin was not.
“I basically started from zero,” he said.
This might have hurt his grade in a cooking class, but not in this one, at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, R.I. Called Designing Food, the course asks students to choose recipes at the start of the semester that they will cook, share with the class, and cook again. And again. And again. With each new try, they’ll make changes as they pursue their own ideal version of the dish.
The point is not to learn how to barbecue char siu pork or laminate pastry dough, although some students did those things. The goal is to understand iterative design, a method of improving products through repeated cycles of testing and tweaking. In other words, Designing Food is one of the rare college classes where you really can get credit for being the most improved.
Erica Pernice, who has been teaching the course since 2021, said that by focusing on simple recipes that can be cooked in a few hours or less, the students can work through four or five iterations in a semester. This wouldn’t be possible if they were designing, say, an electric car.
“We never had enough time to do that properly in school,” said Ms. Pernice, who graduated from the school in 2014 with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts. “You get out into world and discover the process is much longer.”
The week before Thanksgiving, she and her students, all seniors, met in a classroom above the dining hall for a showcase of their recipe projects. The students presented photographs, videos and written accounts documenting kitchen techniques and ingredient amounts, down to the gram. Crucially, they also brought samples.
Some students finished their dishes on induction cooktops in a small kitchen next to the classroom. Others simply unpacked their work and served it up.
Chloe Ahn split a dozen or so Korean soy-marinated eggs with a knife and laid each half on a cushion of white rice in a small bamboo bowl. Natalie Wang set out a tray of sliced focaccia beside a red-enamel casserole that held a batch of Zuppa Toscana, a soup of potatoes, kale, sausage and cream. “It’s sourced from the Olive Garden,” she said, meaning the concept, not this batch, which she had cooked in her own kitchen following recipes that bloggers had reverse-engineered from the restaurant’s original.
At the start of the semester, the students were asked to define the “gold standard” for their chosen recipe. “If this was perfect, what would it taste like, look like, smell like?” Ms. Pernice asked them. “What would the textures be? What would it evoke for you?”
The gold standards, being personal to each student, did not necessarily follow tradition. For Linlin Yu, egg tarts that met her gold standard needed to have a flaky pastry shell and “a very luscious mouthfeel,” so she drew her favorite elements from the Portuguese and Macanese versions of the sweet.
Sanghyuk Seo deviated from the long history of his dish, a Korean honey cookie called yakgwa. First, he invented his own shape, using a 3D printer to build a yakgwa mold with four lobes that look like the petals of a dogwood flower. Then, he baked his yakgwa, even though Korean cooks have been frying theirs for centuries.
“It’s more healthy,” he said. With fried yakgwa, “I can’t eat more than two. They’re so oily.”
Rachael Kim brought pasta con le sarde, a Sicilian dish her father had cooked for her when she was younger. Her first iteration contained raisins and pine nuts, which are almost mandatory in Sicily. But she and her classmates thought the raisins overwhelmed the sardines, which was a problem because her gold standard required what she called “a bold, rich taste of the sea.” She also axed the pine nuts because the final presentation took place in a nut-free classroom.
The recipe iterations take up roughly half the semester. The rest of the course is spent developing new products made from a material that is, was or could be edible. Ms. Pernice calls this the “hero ingredient” project. Last year, one team of students turned chicken cartilage into snacks meant to scrape plaque from the teeth of their target consumers, dogs.
Before starting their recipe projects, the students got a brief lesson in food safety. “A lot of the first tastings are a little sketchy,” Ms. Pernice said.
They also spent one of the first classes molding fresh pasta into different shapes, then analyzing their pros and cons. Which shapes did the sauce cling to best? Which were the nicest to chew? These are the kinds of questions asked by recipe developers in test kitchens and, without the sauces and chewing, by designers as they subject a prototype of a lamp or chair to a rigorous critique.
The first rendition of Ms. Yu’s egg tarts was made with store-bought pastry dough. When she presented them, her classmates told her they had too much crust in proportion to the custard, and were raw on the bottom. On the second pass, she made the dough herself, a first for her. But the reviews (“Pastry layers, where?” and “Pastry feels overworked”) confirmed her suspicion that she hadn’t achieved the flaky texture specified by her gold standard.
The class suggested parbaking the shells before filling them and tenting the tarts with foil to keep the rims from scorching. By the fourth iteration, the feedback was enthusiastic: “It’s goooood.”
For students of art, design and architecture, critiques are a rite of passage. A positive one can build confidence; a difficult one can shred it.
“Crit was really intense when I was in school,” Ms. Pernice said. “People were crying.”
The tone of critiques has softened since then, for better or worse. “In recent years, students are hesitant to give negative feedback,” she said. She also teaches a woodworking course, and when critique time rolls around, she said, “getting people to give feedback is like pulling teeth.”
The Designing Food class isn’t like that, she and several of her students agreed. Most of the criticism is constructive, they said, even cheerful. Students studying painting or sculpture might see themselves as complete novices, with no standing to criticize other people’s work, but these students have been eating all their lives.
“Critique is always light and fun because people are so happy to eat,” said Jin Gu, who spent the semester refining her recipe for lu rou fan, a classic Taiwanese rice bowl covered with braised pork belly.
Although she had prepared the dish for friends and relatives many times, notes from her classmates persuaded her that she was using too much star anise. One student, regarded by his peers as something of a meat expert, suggested that longer simmering would make the pork belly more tender. Over the next two iterations she increased the cooking time until the pot spent a full three hours on the stove. She regarded the lu rou fan she had brought to the final showcase as a personal best.
Before taking the class, “this was my favorite dish, but I didn’t have the motivation to make it perfect,” she said. “I would always just want to eat it right away.”
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