To list a few things that we’ve done so far in our Food Chemistry course, there are: taste perception experiment with baby foods, retention of flavor in oil and water experiment, making pea butter, and apple browning experiment.
Among these experiments, I enjoyed making pea butter the most. It was my first time using a non-micro scale centrifuge in a lab. To make pea butter, we used canned peas and frozen peas and saw how the two types produce residues that significantly differed in their tastes. The “butter” made from frozen peas, though it looked a little artificial because it was so green, was much sweeter than that made from canned peas. Seeing different layers that were divided according to the density of liquids and solid was interesting and helped me to question and understand the mechanics of centrifuge.
In class, we discussed about the difference between interaction vs. reaction. Though I’ve been taking chemistry courses in the past and dealt with many reactions, I hadn’t stopped to think about the exact difference between the two terms and thought it was just another comparison between chemical and physical changes. I learned that electrostatic interaction occurs when forces like van der Waals force are so close in distance that it creates transient dipoles or hydrogen bonds create unequal polarity, while reactions occur with formations of new covalent bonds and covalent rearrangement of atoms. So, this course is taking me back to the materials that I may have learned it the past to think more carefully about them in terms of the relationships among different mixtures of food, the cooking medium, stored environment, interaction with our sense receptors, etc.
I’ve been enjoying the experiments and class discussions so far. The things that I learned in class, chemistry labs, or textbooks seem more applicable and cool because of this class. I’m excited for the upcoming topics of browning and jellies!