• Question: Do you find that cooking is a lot like doing an experiment?

    Asked by Sashascience7613 to Ben, Lizzie, Francis, Max, Sian on 6 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: Max Jamilly

      Max Jamilly answered on 6 Mar 2018:

      Cooking and science are similar in that I like them both a lot! Sometimes cooking does feel like doing science: you follow a recipe (or ‘protocol’ as we call it in the lab), you have to be quite precise and if you don’t do all the steps in the right order then the product won’t turn out well. But there are differences too. In science experiments you have to be very precise and you should always repeat the experiment more than once to be sure the results are right but when I cook dinner at home, I only do it once. In science experiments we also need to be very careful of contamination because it could affect our results – there’s no licking the mixing bowl like you do in the kitchen!

    • Photo: Ben Mulhearn

      Ben Mulhearn answered on 6 Mar 2018:

      Ha! You definitely have to stick to the’recipe’ very carefully if you want good results. The only difference is that we call the recipe the ‘protocol’. In that way I’d say it was more like baking rather than cooking!

    • Photo: Francis Man

      Francis Man answered on 6 Mar 2018:

      As the others said, they are very similar, except that in cooking you have more flexibility and it doesn’t matter if you don’t do it twice in exactly the same way.

    • Photo: Lizzie Wright

      Lizzie Wright answered on 10 Mar 2018:

      yes, agree with the others. Although you can eat your cooking!

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