What do you get when you combine flour, eggs, a teenage assistant and a camera? A creative recipe for teaching a hands-on class in the midst of physical distancing.
Saint Joseph’s University food marketing majors are offered a course in food chemistry to teach them about the nutritional and chemical composites that make up popular dishes. The goal of the course, taught by Theresa Crossan, M.A., an adjunct chemistry instructor, is to inspire students to think more deeply and creatively about how to sell food.
Crossan typically delivers the course in a hybrid format that includes a lecture and lab on campus. When the University moved to a virtual format after spring break, Crossan saw it as an opportunity to provide a creative take on the lessons.
“I decided I would do everything I have been doing from my kitchen,” Crossan says.
With her 15-year-old daughter acting as her assistant, Crossan records and uploads her Crossan Kitchen Chemistry videos twice a week to Zoom. Through lectures and experiments, she has taught the class how to make homemade hand sanitizer, how foods become fermented, the effects of acids on vegetables, the best way to store produce and a baking lab featuring the best and worst baking tips and mistakes.
After watching the videos for the week, students recreate the experiments or dishes in their homes and then submit a written paper based on the assignment. For example, a recent lecture focused on the 16 different types of oils, which are best for cooking and baking, and the proper heating temperature for each one.
After creating olive oil dips, students were asked to apply what they learned by imagining they were the CEO of an extra virgin olive oil company and to describe how they would market their product.
“The students were really engaged with this topic and some of the responses I got were creative and hilarious,” says Crossan. “One student wanted to name their company Sex and the Ziti.”