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Baking soda sodium bicarbonate or baking powder which is baking soda plus a little acid will help your cookies rise.. Like any good science experiment, cookies start with collecting all

Surprising Snacks

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page 11

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“The Secret Life of Cookies” text © 2014 by Lela Nargi, art © 2014 by Marnie Galloway.“A Rainbow of Food” text © 2014 by Karen Stephenson.

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How do

you like your cookies?

page 26

Would you eat a bug?

6The Secret Life of Cookies

by Tracy Vonder Brink

Everybody feels angry sometimes, and getting over being mad can be hard Scientists in Japan may have found something that will help—write down what made you mad and then throw it away The scientists tested 50 college students The students were told mean things about their work and then asked to write down what had happened and how the mean things made them feel One group kept what they wrote; anoth-er group threw their papers away or ran them through a shredder The group that kept their papers said they still felt just as angry, but the group who threw away or shredded theirs said it made them feel better The scientist who led the study says he hopes people can use the technique as a quick way to bounce back when they’re upset.

Throw the Mad Away

Queen bumblebees spend the winter hibernating in underground burrows, then come out in spring to form a new colony Scientists wondered what the queen bumblebees did right af-ter waking up, so they placed a tiny

antenna on some bumblebees’ backs and tracked them with radar to find out The scientists were surprised to learn that the queens didn’t fly away immediately Instead, the bumblebees spent 10 to 20 minutes resting on the

Bee Kind to the Queen

Maybe you should write down how

you feel?

ground in between taking short, 10-to-20-second flights The team says their discovery suggests people can help give bumblebees a better start by leaving grass long and not cleaning up leaves until late spring, so that the queens have a safe place to rest.

Tsunamis are giant waves caused by earthquakes, and they’re often devas-tating, especially when they hit an area where a lot of people live Because un-derwater earthquakes are hard to detect, tsunamis can happen with little or no warning Now “smart” cables could help change that.

Hundreds of cables already crisscross the ocean floor, carrying our internet and cellphone data Scientists say when new cables are put on the seafloor, sensors could be added to them The sensors would monitor seafloor motion, water temperature, and pressure, so that warnings could be sent as soon as an earthquake big enough to cause a tsu-nami happens Scientists could also study climate change by looking at changes in seawater temperature.

Portugal and the South Pacific islands of New Caledonia and Vanuatu have signed deals to have the new “smart” cables installed Scientists hope more countries will follow soon.

Seafloor Cables Get Smarter

If we feel an water earthquake,

under-I’ll call it in!

I’m unbeelievably

tired.

a s k3

Welcome to Chez Lonna.What is all this?

My molecular gastronomy restaurant.

My aunt took me to a restaurant where they use science and modern gadgets to make new kinds of food.

They even printed their menu on edible paper.We went on a tour of the kitchen They had an anti-griddle that freezes food instead of cooking it.

They made food with liquid nitrogen,

a high-speed spinner,

weird lab contraptions,

and they cooked meat by boiling it in bags!

So we can eat these?No, Phil That’s a napkin.

Our first course is a trout-infused foam with

your eyes and enjoy.

Earthy and balanced.

Savory and sweet.

Wow! That’s the most amazing food I’ve ever had! What is it?

A peanut butter and jelly sandwich!

a s k5

First is flour, the ground-up seeds of the wheat plant It gives your cookies body—kind of like the stuffing in your mattress Without it, there’d be noth-ing to bite into.What would cookies be

without sugar? Weird crackers! Sugar is made from the dried juice of the cane plant Brown sugar has some natural molasses in it; white sugar has the molasses taken out Many recipes use a mix of brown sugar and white sugar.

Baking soda

(sodium bicarbonate) or baking powder (which is baking soda plus a little acid) will help your cookies rise.

Butter is fat from milk It keeps your cookies moist and makes other flavors tastier.

Eggs are also very import-ant for your cookies As they cook, the mixed-in eggs hold your cookies together in a firm shape.

Baking cookies looks as easy as eating them But just how does a gooey mess turn into something so delicious?

Like any good science experiment, cookies start with collecting all the ingredients and measuring them carefully Let’s meet the cast of your future cookies.

How to make perfect cookies! This is for us!

salt and

vanilla add flavor

And don’t forget the most important part!

First, in one bowl, beat together the butter and both sugars Then add the eggs and vanilla

Measure carefully! Too much flour and your cookies will be dry Too much butter and they’ll be flat and oily.

In a second bowl, mix the flour, salt, and baking soda.

WHAT’S GOING ON IN THERE?

The secret is chemistry Mix up just the right ingredients in just

Mixing chemicals? Experimenting? Exploding

gases? This is for us!

Now mix the wet and dry ingredients together

Finally, add the chocolate chips! Some people also add chopped nuts, raisins, or coconut Yum!

Drop spoonfuls onto a cookie sheet Ask a grown-up to help you bake them in an oven preheated to 375°F (190°C) for 9 to 10 min-utes And soon cookies!

by Lela Nargi art by Marnie Galloway

Now to mix them together! It’s important to add the ingredients in the right order If you add the eggs to the flour first, the dough gets gluey and slippery and makes it hard to blend in the butter.

a s k7

So what exactly goes on inside that oven? Mostly—heat Heat is a great change-maker Heat shakes up all the separate ingredients in dough and makes them combine in new ways Let’s watch through the oven door.

First, as the dough heats up, it spreads out—that’s the butter

melting!

Before the cookies spread out too far, the eggs start to cook Eggs cook in cookie dough the same way they do in a frying pan Egg whites are full of long, tangly proteins

In a raw egg, each protein is curled up in a little ball

But heat makes them uncurl

Then they get tangled up with other proteins, form-ing a dense net This net makes the dough firm up It’s cooked!

Baking sodamakes the cookies rise When baking soda meets acids from the sugars, it releases carbon dioxide gas—the same thing that gives soda its fizz The bubbles push the dough up Baking powder does the same thing.

Tiny water droplets in the dough (from the eggs and

butter) boil into steam This puffs the dough up even more The cookies start to rise.

As the cookies get hotter, some of the water inside evaporates, drying them out a bit.

When the dough heats up to 310°F (154°C), the tastiest changes start to happen

Proteins and sugars snap together to make many new flavors and delicious smells This flavor-building party is called the Maillard reaction It’s what gives cooked food, from toast to turkey, that delicious “roasted” taste and shiny color.

Finally, it’s the sugar’s turn At 356°F (180°C), the sugar on the surface of the cookies starts to melt and turn brown and crispy This is called caramelization Mmmm! If you want paler, softer cookies, bake your cookies at 350°F (177°C)

Changing the recipe will change the cookies you get EXPERIMENT!

Every cook has his or her own favorite recipe for the perfect cookies.

Customize Your Cookie!

I like to add some blue cheese!

a s k9

These experimental chefs want to make you a cookie unlike any you’ve ever eaten before.

Mad Food Scientists

Some modern chefs are using science to play with food in all sorts of new ways They wonder, “What would happen if I use sugar that fizzes when it gets wet? Or what if I cooked

the dough in a vat of hot water? Or if I froze it instead of baking it? Or turned the ingredients into foam?” They call themselves “molecular chefs”—though all chefs play with molecules

Making Molecules

The secret of cooking, and chemistry, is making molecules change Molecules are very small bits of matter, but not the smallest bits They are made of two or more atoms a little like Legos And like Legos,

just a few basic kinds of atoms can be put together in millions of different ways to make all sorts of molecules The number of atoms in a molecule and how they’re put together make stuff what it is—sugar, or meat, or plastic Molecules come in all shapes and sizes A water molecule has just three atoms in it

water

sugar

If I like it, it's a cookie.Humans eat the strangest things.

Chef Claire Crenshaw invented a no-bake chocolate chip cookie for the Moto restaurant in Chicago At dessert time, diners were given a tray with “ingredients”—little bowls filled with butter, sugar, and choco-late chips Another bowl contained “flour” made of ground-up biscuits and sticky tapioca powder The last bowl held frozen custard that looked like a raw egg

At the dinner table, guests mixed up all the ingredients from the bowls, but they didn’t cook the mixture

They gobbled it up with a spoon and washed it down with cold milk How do you think it would compare to your favorite chocolate chip cookies? Those cookies, always changing!

Table sugar has 45 atoms (12 carbon, 22 hydrogen, and 11 oxygen) Proteins are huge molecules, with many thousands of atoms Cooking (and chemistry) works by using heat or other energy to break apart molecules and put them together differently, to make something new Though getting them to change the way you want—that’s the trick!

a s k 11

seeds to a new place to grow Because so many tasty fruits are red, our eyes notice red more than other colors Red means delicious

plants from damage or do other jobs They help people too Color tells us a lot about our food Before we touch, smell, or taste it, we judge it by what we see Red strawberries, yum! But green strawberries are not ripe yet Green meat is probably spoiled And green bread has likely had a visit from the mold fairy

Dinner time! It looks delicious—tasty red tomatoes, green beans,

yellow corn But why does food come in so many

colors?

by Karen Stephenson

surprisingly, some kinds of oranges are actually green, even when they’re ripe Their skin turns orange only in cold temperatures In warm climates, they stay green But we expect oranges to be orange! So fruit-sellers give them a cold shock to turn them orange—or dip them in orange dye.

Many orange vegetables get their color from a pigment called carotene Your body uses carotene to make vitamin A So orange is a good color to look for in vegetables—it says “lots of vitamin A for you.”

YELLOW

Different animals see color differently Monkeys see orange and yellow well Many tropical fruits are orange and yellow This invites monkeys to eat them and spread their seeds Birds have excellent color vision They can spot berries that are blue or purple or red But squirrels and mice don’t see colors well They often eat dull brown foods.

Are you new to the neighborhood?

I don't think brown is dull.

a s k 13

GREEN

Green is the color of plants making food for themselves and also for us

The bright green comes from chlorophyll, a special cell part that plants use to make sugar from sunlight, water, and air

When trees stop making chlorophyll in the fall, the green fades and other colors show through We can see the oranges and yellows that were always there under-neath The same thing can happen in your kitchen If green veggies spend too long in a dark fridge, they lose their chlorophyll and turn yellow, just like a fall leaf

BLUE

Have you ever seen a blue raspberry? There aren’t many blue foods in nature In fact, blue can turn people off their food

That’s why you don’t see blue french fries in restaurants—even though

some kinds of potatoes are natu- rally purple

But if you walk down the candy aisle, you’ll find lots of bright blue, raspberry-flavored candies How did they get this peculiar color?

It started with the ice-pop try These frozen fruit-flavored treats are naturally clear The people who make them add colors so we know if we’re choosing orange or grape or cherry flavor

But the first ice-pop makers had a problem They had too many “red” flavors—strawberry, cherry, watermelon, raspberry They also had blue food coloring, but no flavor to go with it.

Then they heard about a fruit called a blue raspberry The berries are

really more purple than blue But the name was enough—they put the blue coloring into the rasp-berry-flavored pops And that’s

how raspberry turned blue.

Maybe they turned blue with cold.

PURPLE

Most carrots in stores are orange now But long ago, the carrots people grew were yellow or purple There are even paint-ings of purple carrots in ancient Egyptian tombs

All carrots are scended from a wild plant with a bitter white root Some wild carrots tasted a bit sweeter or were an interesting color People saved seeds from these better- tasting, better-looking carrots and planted them Over time, carrots got sweeter and more colorful

de-Orange carrots taste the sweetest and keep their color during cooking, so eventually they won out over the purple carrots.

Plant pigments aren’t just pretty Color is a sign of something special inside The carotene that makes carrots orange is also good for your eyes The blue in blueberries can help build cells Red tomatoes are good for your heart So shake up that dull brown dinner and enjoy the whole rainbow of food!

Run! It's broccoli!

Now I’m working on a pink carrot!

a s k 15

art by Thor Wickstr

om

you can give your family a delightful breakfast surprise, with a little help from a cabbage

What you’ll need

• Some red cabbage, grated• Hot water or microwave • Eggs

• 2 bowls • Pan for frying eggs • Grown-up accomplice • Brave family

What to do

First, make a little red cabbage juice Ask a grown-up to help with the grating and boiling (and maybe the egg frying).

Would you eat them on the moon? With a mischievous r

accoon?

1 Grate some red cabbage (or get some from a sal-ad bar)—about a cupful.

2 Put the grated cabbage in a bowl Pour boiling water over it, or heat in the microwave

3 Let it cool, then strain out the cabbage pieces Save the red water in a jar

Now you have red cabbage juice!

MarvinI am.

Would you eat them in a hole? Would you eat them

with a mole?