Colin Papenhagen Chemistry Food and Cooking Project "The Perfect Pancake"
How does the ingredient you experimented with affect the food’s overall characteristics? In my experiment, I had the simple ingredient, sugar. Sugar is a huge ingredient for baking and cooking but for making pancakes, sugar is a huge contributor to the formation, taste, and appearance. I changed the different type of sugar being used instead of the recommended sugar, table sugar. I made different types of pancakes using either table sugar, powdered sugar, brown sugar, and granulated sugar. Sugar also keeps pancakes insulated and keeps moisture closed as like a trap.
Sugar is a helper for the construction of the pancake’s formation and changing the specific sugar or even the amount will have a huge affect on the pancake. It helps form the outer part of the pancake and could vary from being a soft not hard surface to a hard solid surface depending of what sugar you are using. When the heat is reacted to the sugar the sugar reacts and forms a outer shell. From my experiment with different types of sugars, the more crystal like sugars like table sugar and granulated sugar made a softer and much more presentable pancake unlike the more powder like sugars such as powdered sugar and caster sugar, the formation was very hard and was very dry.
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 the cooking world, there is always going to be science involved whether that is how much heat is needed to cook this specific meal or how these two ingredients will react. Cooking and science have been involved forever because when you make something, there is always going to be science involved. Science takes a role by producing the result and how you get there. In fact, cooking and science is the same thing. While you think that just putting pancake batter on a skillet is nothing, there is science involved in that along with everything else in the cooking world. Everything you make that is cooking is science however, cooking and science are not similar is some places. Some foods in cooking are not related to science at all such as a salad. Of course there is science involved of how a carrot or a tomato is grown but for the chopping and mixing for the salad, there is not science involved for that. Science is more about reactions and such not for mixing carrots and lettuce.
A cook processes a lot of knowledge about what dishes are the most delicious but what they also know is how to make it and why does it make it amazing. Food cook uses science in cooking all the time that involve a reaction to cooking and they are very similar is a food scientist as well. They both study the food world and process the knowledge of food and reactions to make food. The study the reasons of why this food looks different that that food and know how to make a dish delicious. Though these two types of people are very similar is some ways, they are very different in what they ACTUALLY do for work. A cook would usually do what you would expect them to do and that is to cook food for people to eat. A cook cooks food to simply eat while a food scientist studies more of the biology of foods and the chemical components of food. A food scientist would study the nutrition facts and would be found sometimes studying companies foods.