Science Fair

Since I'm an 11 year old girl, I was in a science fair on May 25 and my friend and I did a project on food science. I'm going to put all the text on my blog.

Scientific Chemistry in Food!

What does science have to do with your favorite foods?

Everything!

Crystallization is when a sugar molecule gets very hot (melting) and then cools and hardens (setting). When that happens the results are (virtually) endless, it all depends on what you do with the sugar before you let it cool. If you don’t do anything to the sugar, you would get caramel after it cools. If you add some nuts to it you would get a brittle. The test that we we’re using is fudge. In fudge the sugar doesn’t crystallize completely, it only melts the sugar in the chocolate and adds some liquid to keep it soft (when refrigerated). Fudge is the result of the chocolate melting and softening the sugar molecules in the chocolate crystallizing some of them. If we didn’t have sugar chocolate and all those yummy, sugary things would not be sugary, and as a result of that it would lose all its yumyness.

Recipe:
3 cups semisweet chocolate chips

1 (14 ounce) can sweetened condensed milk

1/4 cups of butter

1 cup chopped walnuts (optional) 

1.Place chocolate chips, sweetened condensed milk, and butter or margarine in a large microwaveable bowl. Zap in microwave on medium until chips are melted, about 3-5 minutes, stirring once or twice during cooking. Stir in nuts, if desired.

2. Pour into well-greased 8x8inch glass baking dish.  Refrigerate until set.

Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a single celled organism that makes bread rise. Also called bread yeast, this little creature, when placed in a warm environment with sugar, will feed and multiply rapidly. It will also eat starch, which it converts to glucose. The yeast then produces carbon dioxide, which create the little bubbles in bread. 80-90 degrees Fahrenheight is the ideal temperature for yeast growth, when it rises, creating small pockets in the bread. But if it grows to quickly, it will create large bubble pockets. Yeast begins to die at 120 degrees, so you want your yeast in an environment where the temperature is stable. You should not mix yeast into salted water. The salt inhabits the growth of yeast, so the yeast cannot make the bread rise. Yeast has been around so long, people refer to it as the oldest plant cultivated by man. If yeast did not exist, bread would not rise, but instead would be a flat, unfluffy, unappetizing lump of dough.

Recipe:
1 Package active dry yeast

1 1/2 cups of warm water (105 - 115)

1 tablespoon sugar

1 1/2 teaspoon of salt

1 tablespoon shortening

4 cups all-purpose flour 

Dissolve yeast in 1/2 cup of the water. In large bowl, dissolve the sugar and salt in the remaining water. Add shortening and yeast mixture; mix well. Add flour, a little at a time. Cover bowl and set aside. Stir every 10 minutes, 5 times. On a lightly-floured surface, form into 2 long loaves; place on a greased cookie sheet. With knife, make a few diagonal on top of the loaves. Let rise in awarm place until it is light and has doubled in size. Heat oven to 400. Bake 30 to 35 minutes or until brown and crust sounds hollow when lightly tapped. Remove from cookie sheet. Cool on wire rack.

The Global Gourmet, Concordia Language Villages

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Fudge/Detail.aspx

http://edel-science.wikispaces.com/file/view/sci_fair_layout.gif/89799935/sci_fair_layout.gif

http://homecooking.about.com/od/specificfood/a/yeast.htm

http://images.wikia.com/recipes/images/1/18/ActiveDryYeast.jpg 

http://img4.myrecipes.com/i/recipes/su/07/12/creamy-fudge-su-633386-l.jpg

http://www.a-night-in-paris.com/images/typical-french-food-la-baguette-02-225w.jpg

http://www.allbreadrecipes.com/wp-content/uploads/french-bread.jpg

http://www.bionewsonline.com/q/what_is_yeast.htm

http://www.crystalsandjewelry.info/wp-content/uploads/sugar%20crystals%20information.jpg

http://www.food-info.net/uk/colour/caramel.htm

http://www.getprograde.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/pile-of-sugar_sm.jpg

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy By Douglas Adams

It's a funny story, how I found out about The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I was sitting at a rest stop (in Delaware!) and I asked my mom a question that she didn't know the answer to. She told me the answer was "42" (Yes that was a very odd answer). Then she started to tell me about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Their are five books in the series. Book 1: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Book 2: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Book 3: Life, the Universe and Everything. Book 4: So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish. Book 5: Young Zaphod Plays it Safe.

The book is laugh out loud funny. I wanted to read almost every other line out loud to someone because it was so funny. One of my favorite jokes is that humans are only the third most intelligent species in the galaxy. The most intelligent species is mice, followed by dolphins, and then us. The whole book is about a man named Arthur Dent who gets lifted off of Earth (right before it explodes) by his good friend Ford Perfect. Ford is really an alien from Belelgeuse (not from Guildford like he told Arthur before) which is some weird spot in the universe. If I were to rate this book on a funniness scale from 1-10 I would give it an 11.

I think my favorite character is Trillian. Trillian is a human who (randomly) got picked up by Zaphod Beetlebrox (President of the Universe) for no apparent reason and now she is his girlfriend. What I find funny is that Arthur tried to "pick her up" at a party, when Zaphod blew up the place and unexpectedly picked up Trillian. The two things she managed to keep from Earth were two white mice that she cherished, because they were the only things that she managed to save from her home.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a very funny book and I hope you love this book as much as I did!

This is a picture of a book with all five books in it.