I've been cooking since I was five. I love the process of taking raw ingredients and turning them into something much greater than the sum of their parts. 

When planning this project, I wanted to do something on proteins in cooking. My initial plan was to measure the impact that different pHs would have on bread dough, based on the use of sodium carbonate to increase the tensile strength of ramen noodles. However, that idea was abandoned after burning out a mixer while kneading the dough. Still wanting to research proteins and food, I turned to meringue, which is effectively a foam stabilized by proteins. After preliminary research, I decided to study how the foam structure changed as whipping continued. As the whipping continues, the proteins denature more and more, stabilizing the foam, but eventually leading to the overwhipped grainy texture.

This project was my first experience with scientific writing, it taught me how to structure a paper and analyze data, skills that are very valuable with my current research.

I built a Raspberry Pi based microscope camera for this project. I used the Pi Camera from Adafruit and a 3D-printed adapter to connect the camera to the microscope. Using python, I wrote code to automate taking three pictures per slide, labeling them, and saving them in the appropriate folder.

I spent a while trying to use openCV to measure bubble area, but the bubbles formed in the meringue were not consistent enough to be read.