Monday, January 13, 2014

Thats how the Cookie Crumbles

Last week a couple girls from my class did experiments about eggs in baking which got my to thinking: Which part of the egg makes the best cookies? The whole egg? The yolk? Or the egg whites? Does it even matter? For this weeks experiment I hypothesized that the egg yolks would create more cookies overall as well as bigger cookies than egg whites would. The null hypothesis for this experiment was that the part of the egg I used would not effect the amount or the width of the cookies.

I followed the recipe on the back of the Ghirardelli milk chocolate chocolate chips bag. The original recipe called for eggs, flour, sugar, brown sugar, vanilla extract, butter, baking soda, and chocolate chips.

Picture 1 - All three completed batches of cookies. Which one looks the best? 

In this experiment I had three groups the whole egg group, the egg white group, and the egg yolk group. For each group I followed the experiment exactly as it called for until it came to the egg.

Group 1 - whole egg group
The batch of cookies from the whole egg group yielded 16 cookies in total and took 10 minutes to cook. The cookies had an average diameter of 2.67 inches.

Group 2 - egg yolk group
The batch of cookies from the egg yolk group only yielded 12 cookies. The batter for these cookies was crumblier and drier than the original control batch with the whole egg. This is probably because the egg white holds the majority of the water content for the egg which I had removed from this batch. These cookies took 15 minutes to cook. The cookies had an average diameter of 2.73 inches.

Group 3 - egg white group
The batch of cookies from the egg white group yielded 17 cookies, only one more than the control group and five more than the egg yolk group. The batter was much runnier than expected and took 20 minutes to cook. The cookies had an average diameter of 2.65 inches.

Figure 1 - This graph shows the average diameter in inches for each group of cookies 

Overall the egg yolk batch yielded the widest cookies. This surprised me because since the egg yolk holds a majority of the water content I was sure that the egg yolk cookies would not spread out as much as the egg white cookies. Instead the egg white cookies had the smallest diameter. 

The group of cookies that yielded the largest batch was the egg whites group which did not surprise me, again due to the water content making the batch runnier. 

I do not believe I can accept either my hypothesis or my null hypothesis. While I obviously tasted all three batches (and they were all pretty good) I think it depends on what you want in a cookie. If you enjoy a drier cookie good for dipping in milk then I would use only egg yolks in your batter. If you prefer a slightly larger and moister cookie than I would  go with the egg  yolks. 

Picture 2 - whole egg batch 

Picture 3 - egg yolk batch 

picture 4 - egg white batch 

Good Luck with your cooking adventures. Until next time :)





6 comments:

  1. Evayn, this experiment is really informative. I never considered the diameter of the cookings being affected by the different part of the eggs. Do you think the chocolate chips had an effect on your results?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Cool experiment Evayn. It is cool to look at the difference and you can see that the egg white group is much less solid, the egg whites are very solid and the whole eggs looks like a good balance. The graph is a little small it was hard to see what it said, but otherwise everything looks well put together.

    Good stuff!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Your pictures gave a great visual of what the cookies looked like with each variable. Very informative and it helps me when someday I decide to bake cookies. Food blog master.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Very interesting experiment. I never thought that different parts of the eggs could affect the size of cookies. Learned something new. The pictures helped me visualize the end result as well as how each egg affected the cookies and they all look great. You should've brought some to class. Good work though

    ReplyDelete
  5. I agree with Alex, I guess I never really thought the different part of eggs would affect the size of the cookies. It looks like the egg yolk batch had cracks or something in them. Why do you think that happened?

    Nice pictures and graph!

    ReplyDelete
  6. its obvious some patients with Herpes Virus are being enslaved to the antiviral and other supplementary Orthodox medicine just to help suppress the virus and not a cure. I have been with the virus since 2015 until I was introduced by a blogger who also narrated her story online on how she was cured of HPV after using Dr ALUDA Herbal Medicine. This is a year and 2 weeks since I was delivered from Herpes VIRUS. All thanks to God for using this Great herbalist to heal me. I have promised to keep telling good things about Dr ALUDA. Please feel free to share Your problems with him and don’t forget to tell him I did refer you to Him. Thanks. email him  Draludaharbalhome@gmail.com He deals with Alzheimer virus, Cancer, HIV, Herpes, Genital, warts,Multiple Fibroids, ALS, HBV, UTI, Virginal infection, Genital, Wart, HPV, Hepatitis A/B, Good luck, HSV,  Cold Sores, Diabetes 1 & 2, Pregnancy, Ex back.

    ReplyDelete