Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

What tool do I use to measure the color differences in my cookies? I am measuring heat conduction of different cookie sheet metals and I don't know of any way to measure the burntness or color of the bottom of the cookie?
Thanks

Hello and welcome to the forums:

I'm not sure I understand your question exactly, but I thought I should point out a couple of articles that might help. Due to the 100th anniversary of its discovery, the Mailliard reaction has been in the news lately. Here's a bit about it: http://www.food-info.net/uk/colour/maillard.htm. This reaction begins at room temperature, so it's probably not going to help too much with measuring "burn" of cookies. While searching for this, I found this about carmelization: http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/ho ... /id2943963. It would appear that in the temperature range of baking cookies that carmelization might be a good indicator of how much heat is transferred to the cookies. Could you do something like the article did where they compare the bottoms and cross sections of cookies to determine how much heat is transferred to the cookies? Let us know what works for you.

Keith

Do you have a digital camera that produces histograms? If you do, you can put a cookie on a piece of black construction paper and take a picture of each cookie that just fills the frame. You will have to control the lighting and camera distances and angles so they are identical. The exposure data and histogram from the pictures can then be compared to determine the relative reflectance of the cookies. The individual RGB histograms will provide a range of color values for each of the cookies.