Chemistry of Food and Cooking; The Perfect Brownie
I do not think that my experiment was very successful in helping me understand my food and improve the characteristics. I was unsure what to do for this project and I had always been curious about what eggs do when used for baking, so I came up with this project. I was originally going to look into what salt does when boiling water but I am glad I changed my project. If I would have stuck with my original idea, it would’ve been really hard to measure the outcome. There would have been too many factors that could’ve lead to success or failure and determining it would have been close to impossible in order to be accurate. In my experiment, I used a boxed brownie mix in order to ensure that the variables stayed the same and I was easily able to switch the one component. I was not only testing to see what happened to the outcome of the brownie once it was baked but I also wanted to see what people thought about the changes.
After I conducted my taste test, the brownie with an extra egg seemed to be the favorite. This shocked me because it was very crumbly and it was not what the recipe called for. I predicted that this was how it would turn out but I had no idea that people would like it that much. Next steps for this project would include looking into the chemical structure of an egg and go into depth about the reactions that happen, this could help me understand what was actually happening and why.
When I was little, my mom always told me that baking and cooking all boiled down to chemistry. The way ingredients react with each other to create a product could only happen through chemistry. The desirable consistency could all be controlled through adding and subtracting different ingredients. Another similarity between these two is that things happen microscopically and are hard to see with the naked eye. Baking and chemistry are related and can represent one another, like a metaphor, they also have differences. The main difference between the two is the use of units, chemistry uses moles, atoms, molecules, etc and baking uses cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, etc. In Chemistry things usually happen right away and the reaction is quick but in baking things take more time and usually need heat in order for something to happen.
Bakers and food scientists are similar in that they are both combining different items to create something else while being critical thinkers about what will happen when they add a certain ingredient to the rest of the recipe. I think the biggest difference between them is that chemists actually know what is going on during a reaction or when they add something to their experiment and bakers just do it because they are following a recipe.