Amy Fang
“How Bake Time and Ingredient Ratios Affect Cookie Texture” was a 2019 winner of the Boit Prize for Engineering Writing, one of the Ilona Karmel Writing Prizes.
How food tastes is strongly influenced by its physical properties, such as texture and appearance. The texture of baked goods in particular can be altered by adjusting variables like sugar ingredient ratios and baking times. To examine their effect on cookie chewiness, sugar ingredient ratio and baking time were varied in two sets of cookie batches. Chewiness and springiness was measured by performing a “two bite” double compression test on the texture analyzer. An initial analysis demonstrated that baking time is a more significant variable in influencing cookie physical properties than sugar ratio. This investigation also found that a positive quadratic relationship exists between baking time and chewiness, longer baking times of 14 min result in cookie fractures during data collection, and that optimal springiness can be achieved with a baking time range of 10 to 12 minutes. These results confirm previous research in that a positive correlation exists between baking time and cookie hardness.
