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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  New Year Ideas | Study more, online
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New Year Ideas | Study more, online

A vanilla flan can reveal wonders about the science of cooking, besides gratifying your senses

Professors at Harvard devised this edX.org course.Premium
Professors at Harvard devised this edX.org course.

Later this afternoon I will be baking hot vanilla flans at home. I’ve never made them before, but I expect them to feel and taste like warm, set caramel custards with a slightly more dense, baked texture. The flans may or may not come out well. Even the best domestic ovens are notoriously temperamental, I have learnt over the last eight weeks. But my recipe, handpicked by a team of Harvard professors and some of the greatest living chefs in the world, is simple enough with precise directions.

These flans will be the latest in what has been a list of culinary projects of ever-escalating complexity that I have embarked on since early October. So far I’ve caramelized sugar in the oven, made my own batch of ricotta cheese, and made simple homemade vanilla ice cream using an ingenious method involving plastic bags and a mountain of salt. Next week, once the flans have been baked and inhaled in nanoseconds, I will be making ceviche.

What has gotten into me? Am I cooking from some bizarre cookbook? Perhaps it is training for a reality cooking show? Or am I preparing for a drastic course correction in my career trajectory? Is a Brasserie Vadukut in the works?

Hardly. I am merely being diligent about my homework.

On 8 October, your writer, along with hundreds of other people from all over the world, started a Mooc, or Massive Open Online Course, on the edX.org website. The course, titled Science & Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science—course code SPU27x—brings together teachers of science from Harvard University, US, legendary chefs like Ferran Adrià, Joan Roca and José Andres, and writers such as Harold McGee, to offer an inter-disciplinary look at food, cooking and the wonderful things that happen to food as it metamorphosizes from raw to edible.

“At the end of the course," the syllabus says, “students will be able to explain how a range of cooking techniques and recipes work, in terms of the physical and chemical transformations of food."

The idea of Moocs has traversed a “rise and fall" narrative faster than most other such “Internet ideas that will change everything". The term “Mooc" itself was coined half a decade ago but the idea of delivering courses over the Internet pre-dates that by at least two decades. But it was in 2012, with the launch of edX.org and other such initiatives, that the concept really captured public imagination. Many things played a part in this new dawn for online teaching—better online delivery tools, widespread availability of the bandwidths required to view videos, and no doubt the familiarity that faculties and administrators at universities have developed with the hardware and software needed to broadcast lessons.

In November 2012 The New York Times said that 2012 was “The Year of the MOOC". “MOOCs have been around for a few years as collaborative techie learning events, but this is the year everyone wants in. Elite universities are partnering with Coursera at a furious pace," the paper said about the Coursera.com MOOC website, “it now offers courses from 33 of the biggest names in post secondary education, including Princeton, Brown, Columbia and Duke. In September, Google unleashed a MOOC-building online tool, and Stanford unveiled Class2Go with two courses."

The enthusiasm for Moocs cooled somewhat in 2013. It seems unfair to give such a path-breaking idea just 12 months to prove itself. But the chief criticism that has emerged, that Moocs have massive dropout rates, is worrisome.

But this attrition is also understandable. Just because the course is available online 24x7 and the assignments come with generous deadlines doesn’t make it all that easy.

I am currently around three-and-a-half weeks behind the SPU27x course schedule. Hot flan is the laboratory assignment for week 4—“Elasticity"—and I am currently also working through the lectures for week 5—“Diffusion and Spherification". The course is currently at week 8, “Emulsions and Foams".

When one goes through a Mooc course’s requirements it is easy to think that you can find 4-5 hours a week to view the lectures and the assignments. But in my experience life has a tendency to get in the way. Given that most Mooc students are probably working professionals or otherwise incapable of going to a classroom regularly, it is important to schedule this into your routine. Well-run Moocs update their course websites relentlessly. Reading materials, videos, handouts and assignments pile up with brutal regularity. Fall behind a week or two and you can soon find the very act of logging into the website demoralizing.

Like many other Mooc participants I executed the first two weeks with tremendous enthusiasm and regularity. I then began to slack off a little bit. The good thing with this particular course is that it is so rewarding in so many ways. First of all there are all these videos of these great chefs showing us how they cook some of their signature dishes. By themselves these videos are fascinating. But combine them with the lectures that explain the underlying science and the experience is, frankly, transformational.

I can never look at an egg again without seeing it as a sea of tightly bundled up proteins just waiting to be denatured.

And then there are the lab experiments—the wonderful recipes.

There is something truly therapeutic about standing in a kitchen reeking of vinegar as delicate lumps of ricotta form in a curdling bowl of milk. I almost had tears in my eyes as I later slathered on the delicate ricotta on crackers, drizzled some honey on top and munched it all down.

So while I may be a few recipes behind the rest of the class, I fully expect to keep up and complete the course.

My Mooc experience also seems to have flipped a switch in my brain that has lain dormant for years. I am now eager to learn again. Both online and off. I’ve just enrolled for a second set of offline Japanese classes, and am slowly progressing through a Mooc on Chinese history.

It is important, though, to not get carried away. It is tempting to think that you can use these free Moocs to catch up on all your lost humanities or science education. Not all courses will turn you on or set your brain alight. My dabblings in philosophy and literature Moocs have all ended badly. I dropped out of two within the first week.

So it is important to choose your Moocs wisely and persist with them. But they are truly rewarding. We are, or at least the curious among us are, lucky to live in a time when such worlds of information and such excellent teachers are all available to us at little to no cost. It seems a crime to let this opportunity pass on.

I ended 2013 on a high intellectual note, with a brand new, admittedly inchoate, set of skills and knowledge. But now that I am going back to school, 2014 too is looking very exciting indeed.

Sidin Vadukut writes the monthly column Watchman.

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Published: 04 Jan 2014, 12:24 AM IST
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