How does the ingredient you experimented with affect the food’s overall characteristics?
For my experiment, I tested the moisture content and “tastiness” of a carrot cake with eggs and one without (this cake had banana instead of eggs) to see if the vegan substitutes really live up to the standard egg version. While conducting research on what eggs really add to the overall construction of carrot cake, I found that the protein within an egg actual unfolds during the heating process and creates new bonds. This process, in return connects the ingredients together to cook a strong cake formation. Bananas on the other hand, do bond with other ingredients within a recipe (take banana bread for example) and can be used as a binding ingredient; but lacks the leavening abilities eggs have. When beginning my research about vegan substitutes, I was expecting that when using something else for eggs the batter would turn out exactly the same. But when mixed, the batter of the banana carrot cake does not have the same shape as eggs. When I substituted bananas for eggs, the mixture of wet ingredients did not have the fluffiness the oil was not mixed well into the rest of the ingredients. Once the carrot cake with eggs was finished baking, I noted that it had risen quite a bit and came out with a more golden brown color. This is an important factor when it comes to the differences between the two cakes made, because the cake with the banana as a substitute for the eggs came out darker and without much rise in the cake.(Refer to figure 1) This may have been in part because of the banana being such a more dense ingredient to begin with. (Source Used: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1f21/bc1621fe8d091e1fca849676891d70c2c9ae.pdf) |
(Figure 1: Difference between the two cakes I baked)
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