Elisabeth

5/18/20

Senior Project

CR #6

EQ: What is the science of cooking?

Throughout the six weeks of senior project I found that my essential question ended up not having to be changed or adjusted in any way. I think that the fact that my essential question was somewhat vague from the beginning really helped stabilize my project so that I never felt like my essential question needed tweaking or redirecting. At the same time, despite being vague, my essential question still had a clear direction, and so while not feeling trapped I simultaneously did not feel lost and unsure of where to start working from. 

At the beginning of the process I expected to learn a lot of science that was specific to certain recipes and certain interactions based on the recipes I’d chosen. What actually ended up happening was that I discovered that a lot of food has very similar science, and so, by learning one process you have a lot more understanding for many other processes. For example once I understood the science of bread, I could form a strong hypothesis for how cake worked. This simultaneously cut down the time I needed to spend researching, as I already had a strong foundation for the basics of many recipes, while simultaneously validating my learning and proving to myself that I was in fact making progress towards my essential question.

I think that the biggest takeaway from my senior project going forward will be my new skills. It’s nice to know that I can now make not only the recipes I researched and made but many others that rely on similar science. It also gives me confidence in cooking to know that I have the scientific knowledge down so that I could experiment with cooking and make actually good tasting food and identify and/or remedy mistakes as they happen. I can definitely foresee myself continuing this work in some form going into the summer, and pushing myself to see how complicated a recipe I can successfully understand and follow.