Cooking Brings Math Into The Real World
If you love cooking but hate math you might find there is a way to spice up your math homework and make it a bit more palatable. An article posted to the Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts draws some compelling connections between math and culinary arts.
The article begins with examples highlighting the use of arithmetic such as in preparing a recipe using measurements, ratios and conversions.
Ever sit through a high school math class and wonder, “When am I ever going to use this in my future?” If you plan on a future in food, then you’re going to use math every day!
Math in the Kitchen
Cooks and chefs use math constantly, from measurements to ratios to conversions. What is a recipe, after all, if not an equation where component parts add up to create a whole…?
Let’s take a look at how we might teach these concepts with cooking. To begin with, we can have our student help with counting and sorting the ingredients we’re gathering for our recipe. This can begin with preparing a shopping list, move on to finding and paying for the ingredients at the market and culminate with measuring and mixing ingredients in the kitchen. The built in reward of delicious tastes and aromas only reinforce the connections being created in the brain.
Let’s move on to some more advanced mathematics to delight the more sophisticated palate.
The article moves on to discuss accounting for kitchen expenses through budgeting.
Math on the Menu
There’s another number-heavy part of the chef’s work—the menu.
A chef must be able to calculate the exact food cost of every item on the menu, so they can assign a profitable price to it. The food cost is the sum total of all of the ingredients that go into a dish, from the substantial parts like protein and vegetables, to the oils and fats used during cooking, to the spices and even the garnish scattered on the plate….
Both of these examples highlight the way a chef will use everything from simple arithmetic like addition, multiplication and fractions commonly used to create a budget or convert the measurements of a recipe to basic algebraic concepts you might use to figure out the unknown values of a recipe or budget based on the known values.
To illustrate accounting principles we can have the student plan a menu for a hypothetical food stand or restaurant, calculate the costs to prepare the dishes on the menu and work with them to determine the prices we can charge to make a profit while providing an enticing value to our customers.
For a more nutritionally minded approach we can talk about the macro and micro nutrient profile we’d like to target and adjust our recipe’s ingredients to meet our goals. Start with balancing the protein, fats and carbohydrates and for a more advanced perspective consider the essential vitamin and mineral content.
Next the article goes on to discuss how even higher level mathematics, like calculus and trigonometry might come into play in the kitchen.
Cooking Isn’t Magic…It’s Chemistry
Ever heard the phrase, “They go together like oil and water”? It means that these things don’t mix, since oil and water don’t blend. But if you’ve ever had a salad dressing, hollandaise, or bouillabaisse, you know that’s not entirely true. That’s because of emulsification—the process of breaking an oil down into minuscule droplets that disperse evenly through water.
Chemical reactions are foundational to all cooking. Knowing how to apply the reactions is helpful…and understanding why they work takes your culinary skill to the next level and will open up the doors to greater creativity.
This article goes on to discuss other chemical processes and scientific concepts which require higher level algebra and calculus to explain in depth. Using these concepts we can imagine ways to demonstrate these reactions and apply the mathematic skill being studied to predict and/or explain the results. We can use the melting and evaporation temperatures of various ingredients to teach the various states of matter (solids, liquids and gases). The student can use the formulas to calculate melting and boiling points under different atmospheric conditions. Using advanced calculus, student’s can predict the ideal caramelization temperatures and times to achieve the best flavor profile for their dish.
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10 Ways to Teach Math & Science While Cooking
Counting and sorting
Living science
Liquids and solids
Float and sink
Measuring and fractions
Shapes and sizes
Patterns
Chemical reactions
Cold and hot
Making predictions