Cuisine and the Math Behind It. Not all of us are chefs. For some of us, we burn, over-cook, or ruin anything we attempt

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1 Berry 1 Emily Berry Mrs. Petersen Math March 2015 Cuisine and the Math Behind It Not all of us are chefs. For some of us, we burn, over-cook, or ruin anything we attempt to cook, while others cook with ease, creating wonderfully delicious and unique foods like bacon muffins and bite size PB&J cookies. No matter which one you are or if you are somewhere in between like I am, we all love to eat tasty foods. We usually just don t realize how mathematics plays such a huge rule in cooking. Then questions become: what thoughts goes into making these dishes perfect, why are those ingredients important besides that it tastes good, and are those really calculations I see? When you first look at a recipe, one of the first things you do is to figure out how many people you re cooking for. A recipe will normally provide an estimate of how many people it will serve. However, what if you need to cook for more or less people than the recipe says? Here s an example that might help. Say you want to make a chocolate chip recipe, and it calls for: 1/2 cup flour, 1/4 tsp. baking soda, 1/4 tsp. salt, 1/4 cup butter, 1/4 teaspoon of cinnamon, 1/6 cup brown sugar, 1/6 cup sugar, 1 egg, ¼ tsp. vanilla, 1/2 cup chocolate chips, and let s say it serves 1 dozen. If you have six people coming to your house for cookies, then that means they ll only get two cookies each (assuming you make them the right size). Have you ever known anyone (including yourself) to be satisfied with eating only two cookies? Probably not. So, let s say five or six cookies each per person; thirty six cookies total- so 3 dozen. Now, we can multiply each ingredient by three, thus making 3 dozen. If you need to only make enough of a

2 Berry 2 batch for yourself, you can multiply by the fraction that you need. I probably need to make 1/3 of what the recipe calls for, then I would multiply the amount of the ingredient (3/4) by the 1/3= ¼. We ve got the right amounts now, but we have to make sure our ratios to each other are in the correct amounts see Figure1.1 from lifehacker.com. Some, like the source I ve taken the figure from, use weight measurements instead of amount measurements like teaspoons, tablespoons, etc. Ratios are extremely important in cuisine. If the ratios get messed up, then you can end up with a hockey puck cupcake, add too much baking soda you get a weird chemical taste, or if you add too much salt your cookies won t taste good. For baking or any kind of cooking, balance is the key. For example: according to Figure1.1, bread is 5:3. For every five ounces of flour, use three ounces of liquid (meaning water, or any other liquid like alcohol, juice, etc.) However, depending on a person s tastes and preferences, you could change or tweak the amounts, too like change butter to margarine, add or subtract amounts of salt or sugar, etc. Like Alan Henry said in his article, How to Free Yourself from Recipes with a Few Golden Cooking Ratios, Knowing these ratios is liberating (you'll never buy a pre-made box or mix again), and they serve as a platform for you to begin experimenting with your own favorite flavors and ideas (Henry).These ratios aren t mandatory rules, but a good place to start. Now that we got the ingredients and the amounts, we can fire up the oven. But hang onthis recipe says it s is in Celsius. Well we have a Fahrenheit reading oven, so we have to convert. F(Fahrenheit) = 9/5 C(Celsius) If the recipe called for an oven at 150 C, then F= 9/5(150) + 32; which then equals 302 F or ~ 300 F. Or if we re in Canada or somewhere else that uses Celsius, we d do it the other way around. Just plug in the number for Fahrenheit, and solve for Celsius.

3 Berry 3 What happens to the food as it cooks? Depending on how the cook prepares the food, it goes through a process called denaturation. Denaturation is, according to sciencedaily.com, the alteration of a protein shape through some form of external stress (for example, by applying heat, acid or alkali), in such a way that it will no longer be able to carry out its cellular function (sciencedaily.com). An example of when heat is applied is an egg. When someone fries an egg, it goes from a transparent, runny liquid to a white, opaque solid. This process cannot be reversed even if someone were to try to freeze it, meaning the molecules are in a new permanent place. Another example of the denaturation process is by changing its PH level (Figure2.2), aka Ceviche. Ceviche is a Latin American based dish that dictates cooking seafood without a flame. To cook the seafood most traditional recipes calls for soaking or marinating the seafood in lime juice, but no one says you can t cook it in lemon or any other citrus juice. Just like how you would cook seafood on a grill or other, the meat will turn opaque or, if it s shrimp, pink. The chef just has to be careful, because just like leaving food to long on a grill, they can overcook the seafood too. Lastly, there is one more type of food that goes through denaturation to become something yummy; meringue (the white, almost frosting-looking part of a Lemon Meringue Pie). Essentially, a cook beats egg whites while pouring in sugar which creates the whipped mixture. As the cook is beating the eggs, the thermal energy from the beating, again, changes the proteins into a new complex structure. Not all of us are chefs, but you don t have to be one to understand how your food works. Math, Biology, and Chemistry play important roles in the processes of making a dish. As Math will tell us, there are tons of possibilities, combinations, and unique ways to make even the simplest recipe. Heck, I bet there are little to no recipes on the internet that are duplicates of each other. There will always be people who turn our favorite recipe into a vegetarian, vegan, artery-

4 Berry 4 busting, or an extreme variation of the original. And our job is to create, tweak, blog about (if you must), and of course eat these new cuisine.

5 Berry 5 Figure1.1 Lifehacker.com Figure2.2

6 Berry 6 Work Cited (MLA) Henry, Alan. "How to Free Yourself from Recipes with a Few Golden Ratios." Lifehacker.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Mar "Denaturation (biochemistry)." Sciencedaily.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Mar The PH Scale. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Mar