Tony Ham got a Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker Smoker for Christmas. Before he decided to try it out with a rack of baby back ribs, Ham logged on to a free online class on smokers sponsored by the eGullet Culinary Institute.
“I turn to eGullet for techniques and inspiration mostly, not really for recipes,” Ham, a graphic artist from Chicago, wrote via e-mail. (Not surprisingly, he and most of the eGulleteers mentioned in this story communicated through e-mail.)
He turned specifically to the eGullet smoking class because it walked “you through the process as if someone was there having a conversation with you and showing you the step-by-step process. It makes doing something for the first time much less intimidating.”
Since August 2003, the eGullet Culinary Institute has proved that cyberspace can compete with television food shows, cookbooks, live classes and even Grandma. The online interactive cooking school, part of the larger eGullet food site, offers 62 courses on many topics, from making stock to roasting a whole pig to cooking for people with disabilities.
The institute is targeted at what eGullet officials call a “forgotten audience” of skilled and eager cooks like Ham who have advanced beyond the basics of most cookbooks but who aren’t looking to shoulder the responsibilities–and outsized portions–of recipes tailored to professional chefs.
The latest semester of courses kicked off this week with an interactive class on braising. Other courses, including advanced knife skills, pasta, and Indian vegetarian cooking are planned in the coming months.
Classes may be a misnomer for what the eGullet Culinary Institute is all about. Forget rows of desks, blackboards and a pointer-clutching professor droning on and on and on. These classes are essentially themed Web posts open to anyone who finds them on eGullet’s site, egullet.org. Typically, the instructor offers an essay on the topic, often complete with how-to photos, recipes and maybe a homework “assignment” or two. The students reading the post then have a chance to comment, asking questions of the instructor or other readers who have posted comments or questions of their own. The class continues in cyberspace until readers run out of questions or interest.
More than 458,000 “views” have been counted since the institute was established.
Founded in July 2001, eGullet recently retooled itself into a non-profit entity formally known as the eGullet Society for Culinary Arts & Letters. It’s an appropriately nebulous title for a Web site that offers everything from expert commentary on the finest French wines to detailed reviews of America’s top restaurants or the latest dish about food celebrities.
The spark that launched the institute was an online plea from Gerhard Groenewald, a retired bank-software researcher in South Africa.
“I had been a keen amateur cook for some years and found that I arrived at a point in my culinary education where I desperately needed a sounder grounding in principles,” said Groenewald, who now operates a guest house overlooking the Indian Ocean in the town of Wilderness. “Cooking 101 was what I needed and could not find anywhere.
“My missive asking for help from the eGullet membership was in the nature of a tongue-in-cheek request, with no real expectation of more than some sympathetic noises,” he added. “Clearly in retrospect, a gross underestimation of the latent power lurking in a congregation of like-minded and dedicated food lovers.”
Opinionated group
The eGullet members historically have not been shy about expressing their opinions nor have they been afraid to jump in when someone comes to the site looking for answers. When Groenewald’s message popped up, eGullet executive director Steven Shaw of New York City decided to act.
Shaw, a food writer and attorney, helped establish eGullet with Jason Perlow of Tenafly, N.J., a computer expert and restaurant reviewer for the New Jersey editions of The New York Times.
The two men tapped Monica Bhide, an author of Indian cookbooks who also has an engineering background and experience building Web-based learning networks for large corporations.
“I confess I found the project a bit intimidating,” Bhide admitted. “This had to be accomplished with no money and an all-volunteer crew, and at that time there were no volunteers. But with a lot of cooperation and support from a lot of people who shared the vision, we opened our virtual doors in August 2003 and never looked back.”
Bhide, a resident of Dunn Loring, Va., worked with Groenewald in South Africa and Anna Nielsen, a Canadian eGullet member from Oakville, Ontario, to divide the institute’s curriculum into themes, such as ethnic foods, basic cooking and techniques. They looked for volunteers to coordinate the subject areas and work with the instructors. Text had to be edited, photos taken. Then all the material had to be posted online, with the instructors prepared to field any ques-tions from readers.
“The beauty is that no one knew each other personally, and most people have never met or even spoken on the phone. We did it all virtually,” Bhide wrote.
The eGullet institute’s 37 instructors have ranged from cookbook authors and food writers such as Bhide, James Villas and David Leite to those Bhide described as “talented amateurs.”
“We have been amazed at how brilliantly some of the non-chefs and non-authors have performed as instructors,” she said. “We had high expectations, anyway, and those expectations were substantially exceeded.”
Bhide said the lack of money ended up being a blessing because the eGullet institute volunteers didn’t have to worry about reaching a “mass-market” audience. That meant there was no need to dumb down the content.
“Some of the classes cover difficult topics,” she said. “But you know what? We’re seeing a lot of people–the same people who the conventional cookbook and magazine publishers assume will never make stock or bake sourdough bread making stock and sourdough bread.”
Reaching a hungry crowd
On the telephone from New York, Shaw voiced similar comments. The “forgotten audience” reached by the institute is not served by simplistic recipes for 30-minute meals, he said. Many courses offer basic restaurant techniques adapted for the home cook, but not adapted in some “silly way” that minimizes a home cook’s skill or intelligence.
“We’re aimed at the above-average cook but not the professional level,” Shaw said.
Another draw, he said, is that these are lessons that can be done at home, at your own pace, with the instructors reachable by e-mail if there are any questions.
Some Chicago-area cooking instructors are skeptical that anything can replace the give-and-take or the visual immediacy of a live lesson.
“I don’t think anything can replace a hands-on, tactile tasting experience,” said Denise Norton, owner of Flavour Cooking School in Forest Park. “A very big part of cooking is tasting. You may taste what you make and think it’s terrific and it may not be. Nothing can replace the experience of having an instructor taste and feel what you make.”
“It will never replace the real thing because cooking is a sensuous art,” said Madelaine Bullwinkel of Chez Madelaine Cooking School in Hinsdale. “It’s about seeing, smelling, touching, hearing and feeling what’s going on.”
Bullwinkel wonders what happens
if an online student has a question: How fast will it be answered–and who’s giving the answer?
Bhide and others involved with the culinary institute say the appeal is that those teaching the courses have a “true passion” for food that shows in their teaching materials.
Susan Fahning, a stay-at-home mom and eGullet member from Coon Rapids, Minn., has taken part in the culinary institute as both student and instructor. Mother of a 10-year-old girl with Angelman Syndrome, a chromosome disorder that results in mental retardation, non-verbal behavior and severe epilepsy, she is co-author of two courses on cooking for the disabled.
“I have loved the classes,” she said. “Several of them are ‘go to’ when I’m doing something new. The photos and the tips are spot on. The writing on eGullet is good. But, the best part of all is the Q & A [which you are directed to at the end of the ‘class’]. This takes it beyond a cookbook. Got a question? Ask it.”
Changes ahead
Even as the institute prepares to launch its next semester of classes this month, eGullet officials are working to improve the service. Shaw, for one, would like to see heightened functionality, better production and the addition of video. There’s talk of publishing an eGullet institute cookbook.
David Scantland, of Marietta, Ga., eGullet’s institute site manager and editorial director of the Daily Gullet, an eGullet forum, said that another idea being considered is to offer mini-courses that focus on a specific technique, such as ensuring a batch of muffins have liquid-filled centers. He said the group also wants to fill out its repertoire of basic techniques.
“Our curriculum will grow with the membership,” said Scantland, a graphic artist and writer, in a telephone interview.
Andy Lynes, a British food writer based in Brighton, England, served as one of the institute’s deans. He hopes the institute can establish itself as “the preferred online cookery school for serious amateur cooks” worldwide.
“I want to see us complete our offering of courses in the fundamental techniques of cookery, while at the same time expanding our coverage of global cooking,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I think it’s important that we continue to allow the individual voices of our instructors to come through, which is one of the things that helps make [the institute] distinctive, but at the same time standardize the production of the course to increase efficiency.”
The challenge the institute faces is to maintain quality and consistency, Lynes said. Running the program is “very time- and resource-hungry,” he said, “and as a result most people are only willing to serve short tours of duty. They may only contribute one course, or serve as an editor for one semester and so on.”
Yet the appeal for Lynes is the depth and detail of the online courses.
“There is no other online resource that has 10,000 words on egg cookery alone,” he said. “Or such a comprehensive coverage of subjects such as stovetop cookware and knife sharpening.”
As for Groenewald, the eGullet Culinary Institute has exceeded his expectations.
“It is a unique resource that provides anyone even remotely serious about food with solid, cogent and well-constructed guides on a wide array of topics,” he wrote, adding that he is delighted “to have been part of its genesis.”
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10,705 hits and counting
Care to guess the most popular course at the eGullet Culinary Institute? No, it’s not pit roasting a pig. Nor is it making South Indian breads or a primer on potatoes.
It’s “Understanding Stovetop Cookware,” by a New York City opera singer named Samuel Lloyd Kinsey. His initial lesson has received 10,705 hits since it was posted online on Aug. 7, 2003. The accompanying post for questions has had a whopping 26,632 views.
For Kinsey, who promised that his overview of cookware would feed the “equipment geek . . . lurking within,” the popularity of the site is no surprise.
“Unlike, say, making tamales or grilling fish, cookware is one of those things that interests most everyone who has an interest in cooking,” Kinsey wrote in an e-mail. “Not everyone makes tamales, but everyone owns a frypan, right? I had a sense that there would be some sustained interest in the subject, because people are always arguing about cookware.”
— Bill Daley
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Taking a class
1. Attending a class at the eGullet Culinary Institute is as simple as logging on to egullet.org. Scroll the page down slightly to the “Special Features” section. Click.
2. Inside, the institute is divided into two sections. The top tells you how the cybercourse process works, gives you a class schedule for the upcoming term, fills you in on the background of the instructors and so on. The bottom contains the various classes and, listed immediately after each, the pertinent forum for questions and comments.
3. Choose the course that looks interesting to you, click, start reading. The eGullet instructors encourage you to try the recipes and follow the techniques in your home kitchen.
4. Questions? Post your query on the pertinent thread.
–B.D.
