Cooking Caramel: Family Science Spotlight
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As this family discovered in their kitchen science activity, making caramel doesn't require much in the way of ingredients, but recipes vary, and timing and temperature matter!
"My younger son wanted to make caramel sauce," reports the mom who sent in these photos. Sometimes a perfect science moment begins just like that!
When the mom told her son that they only needed sugar and water to make caramel sauce, he was surprised and intrigued. Only two ingredients? As he and his mom browsed online recipes, the student kitchen scientist began to wonder: if you only use sugar and water, what gives caramel its color?
At Science Buddies, the mom found "The Sweet Beginnings of Caramelization *," a hands-on science project that gave them a framework for a fun and tasty cooking and food science experiment. They tried more than one recipe, exploring the affect of different ratios of water and sugar on the consistency of the resulting caramel sauce. Like a classic fairy tale, they found one recipe they tried to be too thick, and one to be too thin, but as they experimented, they created taste test spoons at varying stages of the cooking process.
How does the color of caramel correlate with the taste? This family observed a clear relationship between the two—with many taste test spoons to prove it!
Cook up your own batch of caramel sauce and see what you and your students discover.
When the mom told her son that they only needed sugar and water to make caramel sauce, he was surprised and intrigued. Only two ingredients? As he and his mom browsed online recipes, the student kitchen scientist began to wonder: if you only use sugar and water, what gives caramel its color?
At Science Buddies, the mom found "The Sweet Beginnings of Caramelization *," a hands-on science project that gave them a framework for a fun and tasty cooking and food science experiment. They tried more than one recipe, exploring the affect of different ratios of water and sugar on the consistency of the resulting caramel sauce. Like a classic fairy tale, they found one recipe they tried to be too thick, and one to be too thin, but as they experimented, they created taste test spoons at varying stages of the cooking process.
How does the color of caramel correlate with the taste? This family observed a clear relationship between the two—with many taste test spoons to prove it!
Cook up your own batch of caramel sauce and see what you and your students discover.
Share Your Family Science or School Science Project
What did your recent family science experiment or school science project look like? If you would like to share photos taking during your project (photos like the ones above or photos you may have put on your Project Display Board), we would love to see! Send your photos in, and we might showcase your science or engineering investigation here on the Science Buddies blog, in the newsletter, or at Facebook, Google+, and Twitter! Email us at blog@sciencebuddies.org.
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