Chemistry of Food and Cooking “The Science of Banana Bread”
How does the ingredient you experimented with affect the food’s overall characteristics? (Be specific and discuss the chemical structure of the ingredient and the chemical structures of the aspects of the food the chosen ingredient interacted with as part of your answer!) The ingredient I experimented with (bananas) affected the food's overall characteristics by changing the sweetness of the bread and the moisture. "Quickbreads (such as banana bread) get their rise from a chemical reaction. Gas bubbles are released when the acids in the recipe combine with base chemicals. Baking powder and baking soda supply some of these acids and bases." -Big Learning. The difference in the ripeness of the banana affected the banana bread because at different stages of ripeness there are different amounts of sugars and enzymes and those affect the bread. I think that the different amount of sugars and enzymes affected the banana bread by either not changing the sweetness of the bread or making the bread sweeter. I think this because the ingredients in the bread included sugar, so the unripe banana that didn't have as much sugars as the over ripe banana, didn't add any sweetness to the bread. The bread that used the over ripe banana was sweeter because of how much more sugar there was in the actual banana. I don't know how the enzymes would effect the bread but I looked up what they did and I found this quote, "Enzymes are biological molecules (typically proteins) that significantly speed up the rate of virtually all of the chemical reactions that take place within cells." -Live Science. So my guess as to how the enzymes changed the banana bread was that they somehow affected the texture of the bread, making it smoother and softer vs chunkier and more bread like.
The results I got didn't exactly match my hypothesis. When asked what bread was the taste testers favorite, there was a tie between bread A and bread B. I also asked if the texture of the bread affected how much you liked it and everyone (16 people) except one person said that it did. I concluded that my hypothesis was both right and wrong because I thought that the over-ripe banana bread would be the sweetest and moistest but it wasn’t.
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? Cooking and doing science are similar in ways for reasons like using chemical reactions to make something. Scientists do it to find out more about things and create things that aren't usually consumed. Chefs create things that are always created to be eaten. They both use measurements that are the correct amount according to the other ingredients that are in the recipe. A difference between them is that they use different measurements. Chefs use bigger measurements like cups and tablespoons when chemists use much smaller measurements like moles. Scientists also always are very precise with their measurements because they weigh their ingredients where chefs don't always do that.