Chemistry of Food and Cooking: Ben & Marks Famous Salted Eggs

How can we measure the qualities and desirability of a finished recipe both quantitatively and
qualitatively in order to determine the success of our recipe experimentation?

We can measure the qualities and desirability of a finished recipe through qualitative and
quantitative testing by specifically designing our tests to answer the questions related to
desirability. For example, the majority of people do not want a dry steak, so quantitatively
measuring the amount of moisture in a given size of meat to make sure that enough moisture is
present will result in a better steak. If you want a tenderer pork chop, qualitatively measure
tenderness using subjects in a normal, blind, or double blind test. You can use these tests
individually or in unison to determine the success of your experiment by looking at what you
were trying to do. If youre trying to make pancakes rise more, quantitatively measure the
height. If you are trying to make a more tender egg, qualitatively organize your taste tests.

Conducting tests such as those will yield results that can allow you to determine the qualities
and desirability of your food through data from taste tests and measurements such as moisture
concentration, representing both quantitative and qualitative testing. Basically, quantitative data
will help analyze the physical and chemical properties of the food and typically comes in the
form of numerical data, while qualitative data will usually help to determine the desirability of a
food and comes in the form of subjective testing by people in your normal, blind, or double blind
testing. Shape these tests as needed or required to determine if your experiment was
successful based on the parameters outlined earlier on.

In what way(s) is cooking like doing science and in what way(s) are they different? How are a
cook and a food scientist similar or different?

Cooking is similar to science experiments because in every single recipe there are chemical
reactions occurring if you look hard enough. As I learned through our project, even the most
basic cooking, such as just making eggs, involves somewhat complex bonding and coagulation
between proteins within the egg. A cook and a food scientist are both trying to create things, but
while a scientist must prioritize accuracy and exact data collection, a chef is able to eyeball his
work to achieve his expected result. The extra complexity of a food scientists work is a primary
difference between the two, but another notable difference is that frankly, both have different
priorities. A chef is going to prioritize taste and texture, while that is way less important to a
normal food scientists work, which could be doing anything from looking at nutrients to looking
at how the proteins bond to create the desired cooked food.

Both cooks and scientists also use stoichiometry in order to keep tests and recipes consistent. If
one wants to add more of a specific ingredient, often times he or she must add more of the
other ingredients to keep the recipe the same. Think of scaling up your salad designed to feed 4
but you need it to feed 6. With our project we had to cook the same way each time, controlling
every aspect from the original eggs weight to the amount of salt that we added. However, most
recreational chefs will be less careful about the way in which they are cooking their food.
Science allows for much less room for error compared to cooking however, because it is much
easier to measure out 2g of iron oxide than it is 2g of pork tenderloin. With that being said, the
same stoichiometry present in chemistry can be applied to cooking with ease but as I said
earlier, you can run into problems based upon just food itself, making them different.