One of the largest trends in education are MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses. The concept is being led by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which founded edX, the not-for-profit online learning enterprise.

Harvard’s popular Science & Cooking course, which brings some of the world’s top chefs into the science classroom, will start on October 8th at edX. “SPU27x: Science and Cooking—From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Physics,” is an online adaptation of an internationally recognized Harvard course that uses “deconstructivist” cooking techniques to illustrate the principles of science and engineering in the classroom.

Top chefs and Harvard researchers explore how everyday cooking and haute cuisine can illuminate basic principles in physics and engineering, and vice versa.

What makes gelatin go from powder to solid? It’s one of the many chemical reactions that will be explained in the course. Here’s the recipe. Photo courtesy Jelly Shot Test Kitchen.

Chef instructors include some of the world’s most acclaimed modern chefs. A sampling:

The syllabus. Image courtesy Harvard
University.

The original course grew out of collaboration between faculty at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Alícia Foundation, led by groundbreaking Spanish chef Ferran Adrià. When Adrià gave a public lecture at Harvard SEAS in 2008, his talk drew an audience that spilled beyond the auditorium doors. Encouraged by the crowds, faculty in applied physics developed a four-month undergraduate course that now, in turn, has inspired this offering on edX.

During each week of the course, Adrià and other top chefs will reveal the secrets of some of their most famous culinary creations—often right in their own restaurants. Alongside this exhibition of cooking mastery, the Harvard instructors will explain the science behind the recipe.

You can:

READY TO LEARN MORE?

Head to edX.

Barista Laila Ghambari, a member of the executive council of Barista Guild of America, has created a signature fall recipe for De’Longhi. Among other fine appliances, De’Longhi makes coffeemakers, from drip and steam coffee to espresso and the Nespresso and Nescafe Dolce systems.

Laila’s recipe can be easily made by at-home baristas. Combining the flavors of cinnamon and brown sugar into a delicious cup of coffee, you can enjoy it with dessert, or instead of dessert.

You can also try this fun technique with any other favorite pastries or even cereal.

RECIPE: COFFEE CAKE INFUSED LATTE

Ingredients

Coffee cake is in your latte. Photo courtesy De’Longhi.

1. SOAK coffee cake in milk overnight in the refrigerator.

2. STRAIN the coffee cake-infused milk into a container or your machine’s milk container, being careful to remove any large cake pieces

3. USE the milk to make any espresso-based beverage. Garnish with an optional shake of cinnamon and by all means, enjoy a standard portion of coffee cake with your drink.
  

Some might say that if this is our biggest problem, we should consider ourselves lucky. But the frustration of trying again and again to fish out a tiny piece of egg shell is it for us.

Maybe our local eggs have thinner shells that splinter more easily. But the result is too much time spent each day at this thankless task.

We have tried our best to fish out those fragments, using a:

 
The road to success is invariably long annoying.

And, stop buying extra large eggs (explanation below).

ARE EGG SHELLS GETTING THINNER?

Egg shells get thinner when calcium, phosphorus and vitamin D3 are insufficient in the hens’ diet. Mass commercial producers tend to cut costs wherever they can, so the hens may be a bit nutrient-deficient. Instead, try eggs from a local farmer. Small farmers and hobbyists often use ground oyster shells to provide additional calcium.

Summer eggs can have thinner shells, because in hot weather the calcium is retained less efficiently by the hen. The calcium doesn’t go directly from the digestive tract to the shell, by the way. First it’s absorbed into the bones, and then reabsorbed into the body to help create the shell.

Other factors that can contribute to thinner shells include age, stress and general health of the hen. The extra large eggs we’ve been using come from older hens, and those shells are naturally thinner. As the hens age, their bodies can’t keep up with the loss of calcium through shell manufacture. Eureka!

Solution: Try large or medium eggs.

If you have tips or suggestions, please share them!