IF GCE Portfolio: lab report

In Our second action project of out Food class we studied and experimented with cooking to learn about how leavening agents react with bread along with learning and experiencing new math concepts. I really enjoyed how we got to make and cook the bread ourselves, which made it completely reliant on ourselves.(made it a learning experience) I hope you enjoy.

Leavening Agents
IF

Partners: JN DS
May 11, 2017

Our job in this action project was to make bread using different leavening agents and compare how much they rise. One loaf is using yeast (control) as a leavening agent, another is using the sourdough starter (experimental 1), and the last one is using baking soda (experimental 2). These leavening agents would help us answer the research question: Which leavening agent is the most effective when it comes to making the dough rise? I hypothesized that the baking soda loaf would rise the highest because it is a chemical leavening agent that wouldn’t take much time to rise and I’ve had experience with seeing the difference in rising between baking soda and yeast. Baking soda is a chemical leavening agent while yeast is a biological leavening agent. Chemical agents are live and release CO2 as a chemical reaction, while yeast is alive and eats glucose to put out CO2 as a waste.

Calculations

These are the calculations we made for transferring the original recipes for making each loaf of bread. The change factor for converting the sourdough to our one loaf was x ¼. For baking soda, it was all the same. Yeast change factor was x .25.

Sourdough (experimental 1)

Flour:10 divided by 4 = 2 ½ cups of water
Water: 4 cups divided by 4 = 1 cup of water
Salt: 3 ½ teaspoons divided by 4 = ⅞ teaspoons
Starter: ¾ cups divided by 4 = 19/100 cups (3 tablespoons)

Baking Soda (experimental 2)

Flour - 3 ½ cups x 1 = 3 ½ cups
Salt - 1 teaspoon x 1 = 1 teaspoon
Baking soda - 1 teaspoon x 1 = 1 teaspoon
Buttermilk - 2 cups x 1 = 2 cups
Sugar - 1 teaspoon x 1 = 1 teaspoon

Yeast (control)
Yeast - 1.5 tablespoons x .25 = ⅜ tablespoons
Water - 3 cups x .25 = ¾ cups
Flour - 7 cups x .25 = 1.75 cups
Salt - 1 tablespoon x .25 = .25 tablespoons

A few different variables came into play while making the breads. I constructed a table show the different variables that needed to occur to fit the needs of the recipe.

Variable	Control Group (yeast)	Experimental Group 1(Sour Dough)	Experimental Group 2(Baking Soda Bread)
Flour type	All purpose flour	All purpose flour	All purpose flour
Dough rise time	4 hours	15-60 minutes	5 min
Oven temperature	450 degrees Fahrenheit	500 degrees Fahrenheit	450 degrees Fahrenheit
Bake time	25 - 30 min	2 hours or 120 minutes	40 min
Dough amount	7 by 5 by 2.5	6 ½ by 4 by 2= 52 inches 3	8 by 8 by 2.5
Other			BUTTERMILK

Procedure

Sourdough:
1. Preheat the oven to 500 degrees Fahrenheit
2. Mix all the ingredients together except for the salt
3. Knead dough for 10 minutes
4. Let dough rise for 15 - 60 minutes
5. Bake dough for 35 minutes

Baking soda:
1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit
2. Mix all ingredients together
3. Let the dough rise for 5 minutes
4. Bake for 40 minutes

Yeast:
1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit
2. Mix ingredients together
3. Let dough rise for 4 hours
4. Bake for 25 - 30 minutes

Results

Sourdough: After baking the sourdough, the bread crust ended up being really hard and had to be cracked open. The inside of the bread was also very tough but felt moist like play dough. Despite both the outside and inside of the bread feeling like a play dough filled rock, it didn't look burnt at all. The inside was the same color as whole wheat bread and the outside looked like it could've been white bread. (photos below) It was 3 inches tall and tasted really salty because we had accidentally put in 3 extra tablespoons of salt into it.

"Bread" IF 2017

"More Bread" If 2017

Yeast: The yeast leavened bread ended up looking somewhat burnt, and was pretty under cooked on the inside. The bread tasted pretty normal, but of course still gave off a crispy burnt taste. The final height of the bread ended up being 3 inches tall also.

Baking soda: The baking soda bread overall tasted really good. The texture wasn't super soft nor super tough. The outside of the bread was really crispy and almost crunchy like a baguette. It tasted as plain as bread could get, this seems like the type of bread that needs to be served along with something else. The final product of the baking soda bread ended up being only 2.5 inches tall.

"Baking Powder Bread" IF 2017

I created a graph to see the difference between the original volume and the final volume after baking the breads.

"Graph" IF 2017

Nutrition

These are the calculations for how much daily nutrition you get from sourdough bread along with the total percentage of how much nutrients the bread provides.The average adult should have the following amounts in each of the following categories. The second list shows the percentage of calories, carbohydrates, fat, and protein are in the bread in percentage form according to the daily average adult nutrient intake.

calories- 2000
carbohydrates- 100 grams
fat- 78 grams
protein- 56 grams

calories - 1123/ 2000 = .56 x 100 = 56.15%
carbohydrates - 24/ 100 = .24 x 100 = 24%
fat - .75/ 78 = .0096 x 100 = 0.96%
protein - 30/ 56 = .53 x 100 = 53%

Conclusion/ Analysis

Overall we created some bread that was pretty good and was also not super amazing. The sourdough bread that our group had baked turned out really under cooked on the first attempt and really salty and hard on our second attempt. The bread on the first attempt tasted like sourdough but the inside of the loaf was not cooked completely. We only had time to have two attempts so we analyzed the outcome from the second batch because the first attempt was because of an effect on the leavening agents, while the second mistake didn’t affect the leavening agents. I hope to never make the same mistakes again when baking bread, I'm just glad that the data that came out of the experiment is still valid and wasn't effected by the two attempts. Next time I plan to pay more attention to what I'm doing and what my group is doing to make sure it is going right.

My hypothesis was correct, the baking soda did turn out to have the most growth of 1.5 inches. It had the most growth from it's original height compared to the yeast which had grown 1 inch from it's original height, and the sourdough which had grown only .5 inches from it's original. This makes sense because baking soda is commonly used to make lighter/ more fluffy foods, like chewy cookies or lemon margarine pie while yeast and sourdough is not.

In unit 2 of my Water class I had to make a water filter that would clean water in any way. My water filter is the one below, and I used a few materials to make the filter. Using only small pieces of activated carbon, large gravel rocks, small gravel rocks, and cloth I was able to change the original water’s pH from 3.8 to 4.6 which are both very acidic. I originally thought that the water filter was going to go worse than it did, because the first time I tried to make the filter all the materials mixed together which is not what you want when making a filter.

I built my water filter using the materials I listed earlier, bottle, and scissors. First I cut a hole in the top of the bottle and cut the bottom off, then screwed the top of the bottle back on. Then I filled it with the needed layers with the charcoal first, small gravel rocks second and large gravel rocks third. Next I put the cloth on the top of the bottle covering up the hole and one at the top covering up the cut. A water filter that simple had the highest pH difference in my class. I was really pleased by how the filter turned out. I had the perfect amount of materials and the wrong and right plan to get the job done. It’s pretty rewarding to fail and later get such a big success from a mistake.

To test how well my water filter would function I tested dirty river water from the Chicago river, and to really test how well the filter worked I added even more dirt to the water than there already was. The top layer caught all the large pieces and chunks of dirt that were in the river water, while the gravel and carbon caught the rest of the small pollutants. Once again, to my surprise there was a lot of clean looking water left over in the flask. The water that had gone through the filter was at a 4.6 level on the pH scale and was still pretty acidic and personally was not worth drinking nor would it be worth tasting. The water was still really murky and turbid which is another hint towards not drinking the water. Though the water did end up smelling much more close to tap water than dirt.

A lot of water filters work like groundwater filtration, were the water travels through a lot of materials through the ground. First the filter collected large pieces of contaminants and the smaller pieces of gravel collect small contaminants throughout the water. Acidic water tastes like metal most of the time so I imagine the filtered water tastes like metal.

Before pH test: 3.8 pH -log x =.8 10^.8 = x x= 6.31
After pH test : 4.6 pH
pH change : 0.8 pH