Give yourself a chance to fail

Yesterday was a bad day for me and science. First of all, I forgot to write my Monday post -- oops! Sorry about that.

Then, there was the science experiment.

My son got a kit for Christmas for growing sugar crystals. Part of this kit consists of little, sugar-seeded sticks. You suspend them in a sugar solution and then supposedly, over time, the sugar crystals "grow" on the sticks.

Well, we never got that far. The kit came with one (count it, one) package of super-special sugar that was supposed to grow super-special big crystals. It claimed to be pure sucrose, although the box itself admitted to sugar and egg in the ingredient mix.

To make a long story short, I burned the solution. Everything was going swimmingly, the sugar was dissolving in the water I was heating -- turning the solution from murky to clear -- when things began to boil and the solution went all frothy and bubbly. The bag clearly stated that if you overheated things, no crystals would grow.

Why? My husband, the kindly Itinerant Cryptographer, figures that I denatured the protein from the egg. I'm wondering if I somehow managed to bind the egg protein to the sugar. Otherwise, what difference would it make?

But the frustrating part of the experiment was that there was no going back. I was given exactly one bag of special sugar -- one chance to get it right.

I think too much of science education is presented this way. We believe that if we fail one test or struggle with one subject, we are bad at science. And science is all about embracing failure.

Think of Thomas Edison, the American inventor who held over 1,000 patents for things like the light bulb and the phonograph. Edison was not afraid of failure, and, by all accounts, didn't see it as something negative. Exactly how many times did Edison fail? The numbers may vary, but you can bet it was a lot.

"Invention is ninety-nine percent perspiration, and one percent inspiration," Edison is quoted as saying. His quirky enthusiasm and willingness to try anything is captured in this fascinating article, The Undiscovered World of Thomas Edison by Kathleen McAuliffe in Atlantic Monthly. She writes of one incident in his lab:

" ... Edison and his colleagues behaved with the goofy abandon of high school kids set loose in chemistry class. Searching for a liquid with specific properties for an electrochemical device, they tried caraway oil, clove oil, oregano oil, nitrogen chromate, and peppermint oil. But as night stretched on into the wee hours of the morning, they adopted a more freewheeling approach. The next notebook entry records that they tested coffee, eggs, sugar, and milk ..."

So, maybe I should try that sugar experiment again. This time, I'll make my own sugar mix, using light brown sugar, dark brown sugar, table sugar, Easter candy ...

Keep good records, even when bad things happen

I've just spent the day wading through piles of paperwork, trying to compile our tax records, and I was struck by the disorganization of my filing system. It occurred to me that accurate records are important when conducting experiments, too, even when things don't go the way that you originally planned. One of my favorite scientific papers that I read during my graduate school days recounted a sampling effort on an ice floe that was aborted when the equipment was lost at sea. I liked it because the authors were just so honest. I pictured them standing there on a sheet of ice not knowing what to do next, bewildered and amused.

Remember that everybody make mistakes and scientists are no exception. Want proof? Pick up I've Been Gone Far Too Long: Field Study Fiascoes and Expedition Disasters, edited by Monique Borgerhoff Mulder and Wendy Logsdon, to remind yourself that even on your worst days, someone else has been there too.

Splendid? Maybe not

Last fall, I was making cookies for a visiting diabetic family member and decided to try substituting Splenda® (sucralose) in place of sugar in the recipe. Now, I’ll admit right here, I did not use SPLENDA® Sugar Blend for Baking, which contains real sugar. I used 100% sucralose and the results were so bad that I can see why baking Splenda® was invented.

My initial concern was that the resulting dough would be too moist, since I knew that a smaller volume of sucralose would be required to replace the sugar. However, I soon realized that I had the opposite problem. These were some of the driest cookies that I had ever baked. What went wrong?

When you think about it, cooking is just one big chemistry experiment. And since sucralose has a different molecular structure than sugar, it makes sense that it would react differently than sugar. My first working theory was that, in this recipe, water must be liberated from the sugar during the baking of the cookies. What else could explain the extreme loss of moisture?

Thanks to The Culture of Chemistry, I learned that “sucralose [Splenda] is made by chlorinating sugar, that is replacing 3 of the 8 hydroxyl (OH) groups with chlorine atoms.” Aha! Remember that the molecular structure of water is H2O? You can also think of water as a bunch of H+ ions bonded to OH- ions. Or, to put it another way, based upon molecular structure alone, sucralose should be 3/8 less likely than sugar to contribute to the formation of water (or moisture) in my cookie dough.

But does the chemistry really work out that way? I’m not sure. How much does baking really alter the composition of sugar? And my problems seemed to begin prior to baking.

So maybe there’s a simpler explanation. I found several online cooking forums that discussed the importance of sugar for moisture retention in baking. This led me to my second working theory: maybe sucralose does a poorer job of holding onto the moisture from the eggs and shortening.

In the article "C" is for Cookie, Brian Strouts, head of experimental baking at the American Institute of Baking in Manhattan, KS, is quoted as saying, "During the initial creaming mixing stage, sucrose [sugar] particles are coated with a layer of fat … When the cookie dough piece warms in the oven, the fat layer melts away allowing the water to migrate to the sugar and go into solution. As the sugar changes from solid to liquid, it causes the cookie to flow or spread."

Aha! So maybe that was my problem. Since the sucralose and shortening didn’t blend well to begin with, this process was altered. The sucralose didn’t go into solution with the water when the cookies were baking so the moisture was lost.

But are either of my two theories right? It's been six months now and I still don’t know.

And that’s what is nice about science. You can always develop a working theory (or two) and replace it with a better theory when you learn more or obtain new information. So, if you know what happened to my cookies, drop me a line and let me know!

Whatever the reason, I’m certain the chemistry of Splenda® is to blame. It couldn’t possibly be my baking, now could it?