"How successful was your experiment in helping you understand your food and improve its characteristics?"
For my chemistry food project, I asked the question, “How will changing the thickness of dough affect the texture?” and from this, I gained conclusive results of two types of frybread; a thick fluffier type and a thin crispier type. Of course, time, heat and preparation of the dough played into the final results of how the frybread cooked in answering my question. Throughout this experiment, because it was a recipe that I'd already known beforehand, I was able to already predict the outcomes of certain changes I'd make. As a result, I was able to conduct two experiments in total to test and improve changes to my recipe in order to gain the data and information I was looking to record.
These results were enabled by the independent and dependent roles within my experiment, which were the time the dough was cooked for the independent and the texture and flavor for the dependent. Of course, to have gained the results I needed for my overall project, these were key components to finding conclusive evidence to support my question. How the independent variable of time affected how my bread cooked was the dependent variable of texture as well as the flavor. These were able to provide affective results for my experiment, and I have found them to have given my precise and accurate results of my two types of frybread.
"In what way(s) are cooking and doing science similar 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 the ways they perform and execute their experiments. From my own experience of cooking in this project and the past assignments we'd done in chemistry up at the college (Fort Lewis), measuring, hypothesizing and collecting results are the key components I had been able to take away. In science, scientists make theories and predictions, execute with precision and compile their data that may contradict or answer their questions, which is a very similar process in which people who cook go through.
Although cooking and science have their similarities, they are also different in their own ways. Considering that they are two separate professions, the level of education varies. Cooking is a skill that can be acquired by being self taught, or by attending a professional school, but to attain a title to practice science at a professional level depends on entire of a persons education and what they seek to take from it.. These are the differences that I've been able to recognize between cooking and scientists, although in their own way, they share similarities of education, which are still different.