Physical principles are involved in almost any aspect of cooking. Here we analyse the specific process of baking pizzas, deriving in simple terms the baking times for two different situations: for a brick oven in a pizzeria and a modern metallic oven at home. Our study is based on fundamental thermodynamic principles relevant to the cooking…

Cooking is a tangible, familiar, and delicious tool for teaching physics, which is easy to implement in a university setting. Through our courses at Harvard and UCLA, each year we are engaging hundreds of undergraduate students, primarily non-science majors, in science concepts and the scientific research process. We find that weekly lectures by…

This article forms the second of two papers on the subject of microwave cookers. In the first paper Michael Vollmer describes the physics behind the production of microwaves in the magnetron of the oven, the waveguide and the interaction between the microwaves and the food. This article looks at the physics of cooking, and how the appliance and…