How can we learn chemistry from cheese?
Published: December 13, 2022
Author: Minh Do
Hi buddies,
My name is Minh; I’m doing the 3+2 Engineering Program and currently enrolled in the General Chemistry 1 class! Today, I want to share with you guys the most exciting lab session of my class -Cooking Lab! Acknowledging how students might disconnect chemistry from everyday life, my dear professor, Scott Pattenaude, has introduced a lab session called Chemistry of Cooking to explore some of the basic chemistry concepts.
Red cabbage indicator
When it comes to pH indicators, most people think of specialized chemical solutions or pH paper. Surprisingly, we get to create our own “natural” indicator by boiling some red cabbage leaves with water. The complex organic pigment called anthocyanin presented in the cabbage changes color according to the pH spectrum of the solution.
After obtaining a neutral violet solution, we used it directly to test the pH of various common foods available in the provided station. We got to test a lot of fun stuff like soda water, egg white, lemon juice, milk, etc. Dr. Pattenaude provided us with a color visualization for the red cabbage pH indicator so that we could obtain the pH values of common food.
Cheese making and limiting reagent
You can never imagine how limiting reagents relate to cheese. In the process of cheese making, there is an ingredient that is called limiting reagent - milk. The limiting reagent is a reactant that is fully reacted to form another thing; it defines how much product (cheese) is being made.
Logically, milk is indeed the “limited guy” for cheese making, but we can also indicate the limiting reagent through pH value of the whey. The whey acidity will prove the excess of vinegar as milk has entirely transformed into cheese.
The milk separated into cheese and whey immediately after adding the vinegar, and we used a cheesecloth to strain out the curd. Normally, we never get to drink or eat anything inside the lab because our professor doesn't want us to unconsciously consume toxic substances available in the lab. As we were at the SMART Center’s demonstration kitchen for that lab, we got to sample the cheese and the egg that we used for pH testing. There are still safety considerations for this lab which are glass apparatus and the use of heat therefore me and my classmates still were mindful of the surroundings while having fun.
This lab is like a fresh breeze in my regular lab session as we get to correlate daily activities with the study of chemistry. Being in the kitchen is indeed a creative approach to the study of chemistry, and I’m glad I took this class for this fall semester.
