My Recipe Card "The Art of Egg"
Question D: In what way(s) are cooking and doing science similar and in what way(s) are they different? How are a cook and a food scientist similar or different?
In my eyes, both cooking food and performing science are almost a type of art in some ways. Both cooking food and making things in chemistry include taking given materials and creating a new or enhanced product that was not necessarily there before. In cooking you need precision and precise measurements when crafting a meal or dish, the same goes for chemistry. Chemists use exact measurements to create a product, a product that could fail or not commence if the measurements are wrong. Just as a cake will not rise if there is not enough baking powder, a certain compound cannot be created with too much of one element. |
Question B: How did your cooking process transform your food macroscopically and affect the food’s overall characteristics?
The cooking process behind creating a boiled egg is probably the biggest part of my experiment and what I was looking to gain from commencing it. I tested several temperatures of boiling/cooking batches of eggs to see which exact temp. would get the best shape for the deviled egg dish. As I had thought and predicted, having a higher temperature of the water bath created the best shape (I.E. the cup like shape) for the dish. The hotter the water the more proteins could unfold and "stick" back together to make the once liquid egg white into a solid. While the lower temperatures left the egg white mostly liquid and the egg yolk more sticky and play-dough like. The final conclusion I had reached by preforming this experiment is that 75 degrees is the prime temperature for boiling an egg to perfection. From a macroscopic perspective, the higher the temperature the more shapely and firm the egg whites and yolk will come out, which is what I was looking for in this investigation; the lower the temperature the less firm and more liquid like the whites were and the stickier and gooier the yolks would be, both of which make a horrible deviled egg. |