Chemistry Food Project
Chemistry of Food and Cooking:
The Most Eggcelent Cake
By Payton J Vaughn
Cooking and chemistry can be very similar for quite a few reasons firstly, with my topic which was baking you need to be very cautious and careful that you don't add or leave out too many ingredients, which is similar to when you are doing science and especially chemistry. You can't just willy nilly something and hope for it to work. My mother and grandmother say and i quote “Baking is a science.” and I want to improve their claim. I would instead say “Baking is chemistry because it literally is.” for things like cake and bread you need to use chemistry to make sure your dough rises due to yeast and microbes affecting the gluten and air molecules in the bread or cake, otherwise you just get a doughy bland and disgusting mess of “food”.
Baking/Cooking is different to chemistry because they are different types of work. Chemistry involves atoms, molecules, reactions, elements, compounds, and so much more. Baking however does involve reactions, just not entirely the same. Baking would be like how yeast affects the rising of bread and chemistry would be the reaction of francium and any naturally occurring resource. Those are the few ways chemistry and cooking are different, but they can be very similar in many cases as seen in the paragraph above.
My experiment really confused me more than anything, eggs when properly whipped and added into a cake are supposed to make it fluffier, or at least they are one of the ingredients that do. My hypothesis showed that and yet my results showed quite the opposite. My cake without eggs was the most light on spongy, and the cake with the most eggs was flat rich and thick. Now the rich part was a feature that would come with more eggs, but fluffiness was what should have as well. The best way to determine if eggs really do this is to not whip the eggs into the batter instead just add them in their normal state. Then maybe I could conclude what eggs do to a cake.
My measurements were as perfect as I could get them, I used a kebab stick to take the height, and marked it with a sharpie. Then I took the are of each cake pan, which all were cooked in extremely similar cake pans differing in less than a 16th of an inch. So i did not take it into consideration as much as I should have. The final product should not have been affected more than .1 in total for each cake. In reality that would not affect my measurement grades because there was a large margin between each cakes density. So in all each cake could have been measured more precisely but in the end it would not affect my results very much if not at all.
The Most Eggcelent Cake
By Payton J Vaughn
Cooking and chemistry can be very similar for quite a few reasons firstly, with my topic which was baking you need to be very cautious and careful that you don't add or leave out too many ingredients, which is similar to when you are doing science and especially chemistry. You can't just willy nilly something and hope for it to work. My mother and grandmother say and i quote “Baking is a science.” and I want to improve their claim. I would instead say “Baking is chemistry because it literally is.” for things like cake and bread you need to use chemistry to make sure your dough rises due to yeast and microbes affecting the gluten and air molecules in the bread or cake, otherwise you just get a doughy bland and disgusting mess of “food”.
Baking/Cooking is different to chemistry because they are different types of work. Chemistry involves atoms, molecules, reactions, elements, compounds, and so much more. Baking however does involve reactions, just not entirely the same. Baking would be like how yeast affects the rising of bread and chemistry would be the reaction of francium and any naturally occurring resource. Those are the few ways chemistry and cooking are different, but they can be very similar in many cases as seen in the paragraph above.
My experiment really confused me more than anything, eggs when properly whipped and added into a cake are supposed to make it fluffier, or at least they are one of the ingredients that do. My hypothesis showed that and yet my results showed quite the opposite. My cake without eggs was the most light on spongy, and the cake with the most eggs was flat rich and thick. Now the rich part was a feature that would come with more eggs, but fluffiness was what should have as well. The best way to determine if eggs really do this is to not whip the eggs into the batter instead just add them in their normal state. Then maybe I could conclude what eggs do to a cake.
My measurements were as perfect as I could get them, I used a kebab stick to take the height, and marked it with a sharpie. Then I took the are of each cake pan, which all were cooked in extremely similar cake pans differing in less than a 16th of an inch. So i did not take it into consideration as much as I should have. The final product should not have been affected more than .1 in total for each cake. In reality that would not affect my measurement grades because there was a large margin between each cakes density. So in all each cake could have been measured more precisely but in the end it would not affect my results very much if not at all.