Project by: Nina Gerzema (10th Grade), Gwen Raffo (10th Grade)
Project Advisor: Kara Luce
Student(s)’s Advisor(s): Jess Prohias-Gardiner

In our Honors Project this trimester, we explored how food aerates. We looked into two foods specifically: eggs and whipped cream. These were two foods that we knew would aerate easily, and we wanted to know why. We spent one week working with whipped cream. We used an air canister to make almost instant whipped cream, and then we used an electric whisk and compared them. We also spent one week on eggs, and we made a fluffy omelet and researched why that worked.

To document our whole process through videos and scientific explanations, we made a blog that can be found by clicking on the image below:

The Aeration Project: Reflection

One thing that we’ve learned by working on the Aeration Project is that there are so many ways that air can be incorporated into food, as well as the impact it can have based on the quantities in relation to the other ingredients. A challenge that arose when working on this project was finding recipes and foods that didn’t take as long as something such as the use of yeast in bread. Since shooting, editing, and researching each food turned out to be very time consuming, especially the filming, we decided on only doing two foods out of the five. Overall, we are very satisfied with the turnout, what we’ve learned along the way, and experimenting in the kitchen with foods we normally wouldn’t attempt at making. We hope to inspire others to experiment in their kitchen, trying out new materials or recipes they normally wouldn’t have tried, and possibly looking further into what the science may be behind a certain aspect of baking/cooking they haven’t thought much about.

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Please write a description of the project you are proposing. Why do you want to take this on, and what do you hope to learn?

We want to learn about how foods can be formed into an “aerated” form of itself, and whether we need to add anything, and if so, what. We would like to discover what we can turn into foam at the particle level, find out what tools we may need to “aerate” something, and look closer into what the technique we are using to aerate our food is doing to make it fluffy.

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Over the course of this trimester, we looked into two foods that can be aerated and how that process worked. We focused on eggs and whipped cream. For each food, we started with aerating it and making something out of it.

Whip

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What is your proposed outcome? How will you be able to demonstrate successful completion of this Project?

Our end product would be a digital food blog – google site of different foods, ways to aerate and cook them, and an in-depth description of what is happening to the food and comparisons and contrast the two techniques.

When do you plan on meeting?
Gwen and I will meet after school and come up with a schedule as we go.