Recipe Card |
ReflectionHow successful was your experiment in helping you understand your food and/or improve its characteristics? What would be next steps if you were to continue research on this topic?
I believe that my experiment was great for helping me learn about and understand doughnuts. Before this experiment I knew almost nothing about frying and how it works. Now I could tell you in a lot of detail how doughnuts rise and cook. If I was to continue to research this topic there is one topic I want to dive into more than any other. That is how taste is affected by the change in yeast. I did include sweetness in my experiment but I didn’t dive into the science behind it as much as I wanted to. I know there is an equation I could find to calculate the sugar of my doughnuts. This is a big topic and I want to explore it more than any other. How does the ingredient(or process) you experimented with affect the food’s overall characteristics? In my experiment I manipulated the ingredient of yeast. Yeast has a direct affect on the other ingredients but mostly sugar. Once heat is applied to the doughnuts the build up of yeast or C85H124N14O16S breaks apart. This allows for the sugar or C12H22O11 to mix with the oxygen and carbon in the yeast to create carbon dioxide and affect the rise. But the carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen also combine to create alcohol or C2H6O. But the alcohol doesn't end up affecting the doughnuts in terms of taste because when exposed to heat it dehydrates and evaporates out of the doughnuts. In what way(s) are cooking and doing science similar and in what way(s) are they different? How are a cook and a scientist investigating food similar or different? Cooking and Science have a lot in common. Most cooking methods involve changing the particles of the food by transforming them. During cooking we also apply heat which can cause different particles to separate and combine with other making new compounds causing things like rise in baking. In a way you can think of a cook as just another scientist because both have to know what changing in food causes in the final dish. When chefs are experimenting with their food by adding spices they are using what they know about how it affects food to make the dish better. But there are also differences between science and cooking. In science you are doing things in a controlled contained environment. But in cooking things are done in a kitchen with very little care for people around you or how the final product may turn out. |