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" File this one under your &amp;quot;Reasons We Wish We Had Gone to Harvard&amp;quot; list. It has recently come to our attention that the storied university&amp;#039;s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and holds a lecture series in the fall on food and cooking \u2014 not just the rote preparation or the recipes \u2014 but the science of the process. And they manage to bring in some pretty smart researchers and chefs, like Wylie Dufresne of WD-50 (read his comments to Esquire on how to cook the perfect egg here), David Chang of Momofuku, Harold McGee of the New York Times, and many more. Rarely do college lecture series zero in on one topic with this depth of exploration and this stacked a weekly seasonal lineup, and they don&amp;#039;t fk around. Here&amp;#039;s a snippet from McGee&amp;#039;s opening talk, which more-or-less sets the stage for the entire series:   I think we got off the track and thought that food science and food chemistry are not that interesting. They&amp;#039;re boring, they don&amp;#039;t really have to do with what we do in our homes and what we enjoy about foods. The turnaround came in the 1960s with this man, Nicholas Kurti, who was a professor of physics at Oxford. He was a distinguished physicist, but he also really loved food. And he tried to marry the two interests that he had. He said in 1969 that it&amp;#039;s shocking that we knew more about the atmosphere of Venus than what we did about what goes on inside our souffl\u00E9s, and set about to remedy that situation by putting a thermacouple inside a souffl\u00E9 in his home oven and watching the temperature and checking to see its consistency as it cooked. And what he noticed was\u2014by the way, this graph is going [right to left], so time zero is at the right and forty minutes is at the far left\u2014what he noticed was that the perfect consistency, as far as he was concerned, came at the end of that plateau, before the curve began to rise again. That plateau has to do with the denaturation of the egg proteins. They&amp;#039;re solidifying. They&amp;#039;re coagulating. It&amp;#039;s when that process is over, but just barely over, that the souffl\u00E9 is at its best.   And Kurti&amp;#039;s diagram:  And like the fine educators they are, they have put all of their lectures online for free consumption. We&amp;#039;re interested in the ones featuring White House pastry chef Bill Yosses and master chocolatier Enric Rovira. For Valentine&amp;#039;s Day, of course. Check out the first lecture here:      "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/food/a18416/harvard-science-cooking-lectures-15020279/?src=rss>