Chemistry
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Chemistry of Food and Cooking
“Chèvre”
How can we design an experiment and measure the qualities and desirability of a finished recipe both quantitatively and qualitatively in order to determine the success of our recipe experimentation?
To complete an experiment and yield both quantitative and qualitative results you need to design your experiment very carefully. Quantitative data is information about quantities, or information that can be measured and written down with numbers. Some examples in chemistry could be change in temperature, change in mass, change in density, etc. Measuring quantitative data in an experiment usually involves using structured research instruments like scales, rulers, thermometers, and other devices that are standard for producing number measurements. Quantitative data is good to determine success because it gives you concrete measurements that can’t be interpreted differently by different people.
Qualitative data is the opposite, it reflects the non numerical results. These are the results you can touch, taste, and feel. Examples in our food chemistry could be sweetness, texture changes, fluffiness, etc. Qualitative results are good to determine which food turned out the best, but these results can vary between people. One person’s definition of “fluffy” could be different than someone else's understanding of the word, so your results won’t necessarily be accurate. To design an experiment yielding qualitative results, a survey is often used. This way you get a large number of opinions to hopefully acquire more accurate results.
In what ways are cooking and doing science similar and in what ways are they different? How are a cook and a food scientist similar or different?
When you sit down and really think about it, cooking and science, especially chemistry, are very similar. When you cook, you mix different things together to come up with a product. When you do chemistry, you mix things together and analyze whatever the product is.
When we cook, we try recipes and figure out what’s good and what’s bad about them and then change them accordingly. We follow careful instructions to get the results we want. This is very similar to food science and chemistry because we do the exact same thing with them! In chemistry experiments, we have a set of instructions to follow and when we follow them just right, we get the intended results. They are also similar on a molecular level. When you cook or practice food science, you are forcing chemical reactions to occur. You break bonds between atoms and molecules and new ones form.
While there are similarities, there are also differences. When you cook, you are usually looking for one, specific result. When a scientist practices food science, they might be testing different results without having a specific outcome in mind. Food scientists do experiments with no specific goal in mind. They might have hypothesis’ and ideas of what might happen, but they don’t know for certain. Even with these slight differences, food science and cooking are extremely similar.
To complete an experiment and yield both quantitative and qualitative results you need to design your experiment very carefully. Quantitative data is information about quantities, or information that can be measured and written down with numbers. Some examples in chemistry could be change in temperature, change in mass, change in density, etc. Measuring quantitative data in an experiment usually involves using structured research instruments like scales, rulers, thermometers, and other devices that are standard for producing number measurements. Quantitative data is good to determine success because it gives you concrete measurements that can’t be interpreted differently by different people.
Qualitative data is the opposite, it reflects the non numerical results. These are the results you can touch, taste, and feel. Examples in our food chemistry could be sweetness, texture changes, fluffiness, etc. Qualitative results are good to determine which food turned out the best, but these results can vary between people. One person’s definition of “fluffy” could be different than someone else's understanding of the word, so your results won’t necessarily be accurate. To design an experiment yielding qualitative results, a survey is often used. This way you get a large number of opinions to hopefully acquire more accurate results.
In what ways are cooking and doing science similar and in what ways are they different? How are a cook and a food scientist similar or different?
When you sit down and really think about it, cooking and science, especially chemistry, are very similar. When you cook, you mix different things together to come up with a product. When you do chemistry, you mix things together and analyze whatever the product is.
When we cook, we try recipes and figure out what’s good and what’s bad about them and then change them accordingly. We follow careful instructions to get the results we want. This is very similar to food science and chemistry because we do the exact same thing with them! In chemistry experiments, we have a set of instructions to follow and when we follow them just right, we get the intended results. They are also similar on a molecular level. When you cook or practice food science, you are forcing chemical reactions to occur. You break bonds between atoms and molecules and new ones form.
While there are similarities, there are also differences. When you cook, you are usually looking for one, specific result. When a scientist practices food science, they might be testing different results without having a specific outcome in mind. Food scientists do experiments with no specific goal in mind. They might have hypothesis’ and ideas of what might happen, but they don’t know for certain. Even with these slight differences, food science and cooking are extremely similar.