Flour power
When Joanne Chang was approached by a cable TV network in 2006 to host a show about the science of sweets, she was thrilled. The owner of the landmark Flour Bakery and a 1991 graduate of Harvard, where she was an applied mathematics concentrator, Chang always enjoys discussing her pastries, but she loves talking about them at the molecular level best. So she was disappointed when out jumped celebrity chef Bobby Flay, challenging her to a cook-off of her famous sticky buns for his show “Throwdown.” There would be no science TV show. It had all been a ruse. But Chang got her moment in the sun Monday evening at the Science Center where, to a packed house, she delved into the basis of sweets as part of the Science and Cooking lecture series sponsored by the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Reassuring the crowd that there was cake waiting to...