From bench to bread: how science can enhance your hobbies

Researchers describe how they are using skills honed in the laboratory in their creative pursuits

When Chantle Swichkow hops on a Zoom call, it’s unclear whether she’s logging in from the laboratory or her home. She is in her kitchen, but there are clear markings of a scientist at work. A microscope is on the counter to her left, atop a stack of thick textbooks. A large whiteboard dominates the background, documenting more than a dozen fermentation projects alongside their status and potential next steps.

“I also have a whole little set-up over here with some sauces and some vinegars,” she says, motioning off camera. Her at-home experiments run the gamut of fermentation consumables. She bakes bread, crafts kombucha and concocts kimchi. She has also dabbled in making miso from a type of tortilla chip, and in creating her own peach rings from fermented fruits.

Like many people, Swichkow’s passion for home-based fermentation experiments started during the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, she was doing her PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), studying the genetics of metabolic diseases in mice.

“I was so used to getting up every day and going and doing experiments in the lab. When the world shut down, it was like, I don’t know what to do with myself,” says Swichkow, who describes herself as a fermented-food scientist in her profile on the networking site LinkedIn. “I ended up throwing all of my experimental angst into a sourdough starter that my husband had given me,” she says.

She became so intrigued by the genetic variation in yeast that her postdoctoral studies at UCLA, which ended last December, focused on the genetic architecture of yeast–bacteria interactions in fermented environments. She would conduct research in the lab, but also use her expertise — and sometimes the yeast — to conduct her own experiments at home as part of a hobby that continued beyond the lockdowns.

“One of my favourite projects now is my own personal sourdough starter that I call the Frankenstarter,” she says. “I brought a handful or so of different sourdoughs that I collected, some from a bakery, some from industrial contexts, into my postdoc lab, but I had some left over, and I ended up just combining them all together.” (Swichkow notes that she wouldn’t usually eat the experiments that come out of the lab.)

Chantelle Swichkow has experimented with making miso with Takis, a type of tortilla chip.Credit: Chantle Swichkow

Bringing work home is not always about making delicious food, nor is it possible for all scientific disciplines. Virologists can’t bring their specimens back in their briefcases, and chemists can’t play around with hazardous chemicals at home. But for scientists in certain fields, there are ways for scientific knowledge to influence — and enhance — hobbies.

Carrying over to the kitchen

In labs, researchers follow the scientific method: questioning the world, making hypotheses and testing them accordingly. Swichkow applies a similar framework in the kitchen.

“It’s about knowing what the question is,” she explains. “Sometimes it’s ‘can I make vinegar from this leftover bottle of wine?’ and if I do, ‘what will it taste like?’”

Yvonne Henskens, a biochemist who specializes in haemostasis at Maastricht University Medical Center in the Netherlands, also sees overlap between her lab work and at-home cooking projects. She follows project-management processes with her home ‘experiments’ producing sourdough, cheese and yogurt. Her lab focus is on developing blood tests. But she says that the project-management process is identical. “So I say, on this day I have to do this. On this day, I have to do that. And then I have a checklist.”

These lab and home checklists can resemble each other, because both processes involve exploration, documentation and testing. In the first step, she brainstorms new reagents (or ingredients, if she’s cooking), followed by a literature review. In the lab that means researching the history of the tests or the reagents, and in the kitchen it means reading recipes. Then she tests the variables, such as time or temperature. Finally, it’s presentation time, either in the clinic or at the dinner table.

Swichkow describes a similar process. “I label things in the same way I would label cultures in the lab,” she explains. “I even got myself a whole set of laboratory tape and pens because I really just like that process,” she says. “I keep meticulous notes because, for me, it’s about reproducibility.”

But flexibility is also key. According to Henskens, a protocol is important but, in some circumstances, it can be amended. “I want people to understand what they are doing, follow the protocol, but also divert if it’s needed,” she says. In certain situations, such as encountering a strange result, the lab technician might decide to run an extra control, to calibrate an instrument or to use extra reagents, she adds.

“It’s the same with recipes,” she says. “You really have to taste and then have the capability of changing it.” Take lemon juice or red peppers, which will never taste the same each time. “Knowledge of ingredients and their variation, their properties in different cooking techniques makes it possible to deviate from recipes.”

An alternative outlet for science

Jacob Brejcha also credits his cooking skills to science. Transitioning from a bachelor’s degree in chemistry to a master’s in chemical engineering in 2021 meant the time he spent in the lab shrunk. But he channelled his passion for hands-on experimentation into cooking, finding an outlet for skills such as patience and precision, which he’d honed as an undergraduate at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.

“A lot of those reactions take a long time, so if you mess something up, you’re probably not going to finish your lab work,” says Brejcha, who now works as a licensing associate at Purdue Research Foundation, a non-profit institute that promotes entrepreneurship and helps researchers to secure patents. “Sometimes these baking projects take multiple hours, so it’s important to really be a stickler for getting the measurements right.” Other aspects of the scientific method also creep into his cooking — isolating variables and taking stock of what went wrong to improve the next meal.

A scientific background doesn’t just enhance hobbies in the home — gardens are also a place in which expertise can shine. Conservation biologist Shaun McCoshum at engineering and surveying firm Westwood Professional Services in Odessa, Texas, has been applying a conservation-science approach to gardening.

“Conservation is trying to rebalance nature and let things be messy in a way to support wildlife and help these natural systems continue, and clean up the messes that we’ve made, either from invasive species, pollution or overall habitat destruction,” he explains.

In his garden, he tries to find ways for native species, such as toads, to thrive. And like Brejcha, he uses the scientific method. “I’ve got gradients of sandy soils in different pockets, but they all have the same Sun exposure, and they all have the same kind of vegetation cover,” he explains. “I’m trying to control as many variables as possible to see which soils are going to support which species.”

Shaun McCoshum collected and weighed monarch butterflies before releasing them as part of his at-home scientific approach to gardening.Credit: Shaun McCoshum

Scientific knowledge and skills can also enhance other hobbies that take place outside the home. Rosalie Phillips, a mechanical engineer at medical-equipment company Agiliti in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, spends most of her days prototyping health tools, a role that requires both a computer and physical engineering work. But over the past few years, she has been leaning into hands-on projects outside work, exploring the world of glass neon. It’s meant to be a creative outlet, but she is applying what she’s learnt throughout her education and career.

“One of the biggest things that I take from my day-to-day is the practical spatial understanding,” she explains. The complex glass tubing that holds the neon in place often needs to be delicately and deliberately shaped. “You can rarely bend them in precise order,” says Phillips. “You have to plan five steps ahead to make sure that nothing conflicts with itself.”

Similarly, she says, engineers learn to be meticulous with their projects because if they mess something up, they have to spend several hours getting back to the point at which they can try again. “The desire to make sure you’re measuring everything and setting everything up so that when you do it, you’re setting yourself up for success, is definitely learned from mechanical engineering,” she says.