Cookies
Alor Sahoo
Cookies are a beginner’s bake: you just mix, scoop, and bake per the instructions to induce the right chemical changes. But here’s why I struggle with such recipes:
X cups of all-purpose flour, but my brother is gluten-intolerant. Substituting almond or coconut flour would mess with texture.
Y cups of granulated sugar, but my dad is diabetic. Monk fruit extract would be too overpowering. Stevia leaf has an odd, minty aftertaste, so that’s risky.
Once the other ingredients are mixed, bake for Z minutes. Munch on the leftover dough.
Lastly, serve the cookies with milk, but my mom is lactose intolerant. Soy milk works, but it’s high in sugar.
Moreover, while numerous substitute cookies already exist for such dietary restrictions, they do a half-baked job. Supermarket gluten-free cookies consoled my brother, helping me apologize when I lost his Nintendo game in elementary school—but my dad couldn’t enjoy them. Sorbet ice cream sandwiches celebrated my mom on her birthday—but they excluded my brother.
These incidents compelled me to create, isolate, and refine my own alternative cookie recipe.
Here, rote recipe-following won’t suffice; rather, I scrutinize my ingredients’ behavior. I learn how gluten’s molecular chains affect its chewiness, how sugar alternatives trick our taste buds, and how butter rearranges its molecules when it browns. Understanding these nuances and limitations of my ingredients help me concoct something palatable.
So when I walk into my kitchen to experiment, apron ready and notebook in hand, I’m thinking like a chemist. Instead of avoiding toxic chemicals, I avoid “trigger” ingredients. Instead of optimizing for reaction efficiency in the lab, I’m optimizing for texture and taste in the kitchen.
Before starting, a chemist prepares and double-checks their chemicals, so I do the same with my ingredients. Instead of milligrams, I calibrate to teaspoons or tablespoons. Instead of labeling chemical-grade bottles, I label old yogurt containers of ingredients. While mixing up baking powder with baking soda won’t explode and release toxic gas, it would form a dense puck, which is (almost) as bad.
Chemists don’t cut corners. Certain procedures can decompose chemicals, so I patiently set aside backup samples. Similarly, when I bake, I set aside some cookie dough so that if any cookies imploded, exploded, melted, burned, decomposed, and/or crumbled while baking, I can formulate a Plan B with my backup dough—or just eat it with my family.
Despite taking these precautions, I have to adapt to any circumstance. For example, my budget isn’t infinite, so fancy lab or kitchen equipment isn’t always accessible. Our lab doesn’t have expensive vacuum flasks, but we make do with styrofoam and aluminum foil for insulation. I don’t have a stand mixer, but I compensate with an immersion blender and intermittent microwaving.
However, I can’t discover the “magic” recipe or reaction independently: I need to consult others. When I’m deciding between two different oxidizers, I’ll bounce ideas off my research mentor, who’s been researching for decades. When I’m deciding between sugar alternatives, I’ll consult my dad, who’s been using them since 2007.
Ultimately, no matter what steps I take, I’ll encounter failure: that’s the way the cookie crumbles. But I embrace and analyze these failures instead of discarding them. In the lab, I’ll run fancy-but-not-so-fancy tests called NMR and TLC to investigate; at home, I’ll poll my family to pinpoint any issues.
So far, this approach has yielded a decent chocolate chip cookie, but more importantly, it has yielded a piece of my identity. I’ve realized that I’m the type of person who views the world through many lenses—and I’m not afraid to interchange them on occasion. I’ll use the chemistry lens to understand baking, the baking lens to understand family, and the chemistry-baking-family lens to understand myself. Whatever problems may come in the future, my experience perfecting these cookies has taught me a versatile mindset that will remain central to my identity.
