chemie — Blog — Food Bandits

Today we’ve finally arrived at the fourth part of our Chemistry of Baking series. We always say “everything is chemical” (you, me, your neighbour, and literally everything around you) and you can see this most clearly during baking. You have your basic ingredients and you change their chemical properties with heat in the oven to create a wonderful cake. It’s the ultimate definition of what chemistry is. Today, we’ll be discussing the role of fat in the baking process. What is it’s function?

How to read a list of ingredients

Commercials often use a combination of natural and pure when advertising certain products. This doesn’t really make much sense, though, because in chemistry it’s not actually possible for something to be both natural and pure. In nature, you don’t find pure substances, so how can something be both pure and natural? Let’s say it’s a marketing gimmick (or, to use a more accurate word, deception).

What is margarine?

Margarine is often compared to plastic and it’s said not to be a “natural” product – whatever that means. It may seem scary at first, seeing all those strange terms when you read about how margarine is made. For example, they talk about extraction, molecules and use a lot of other nerd-terms. Which is why our very own and favourite chemistry teacher will now helpfully explain everything. What exactly is margarine?