Food Science! Caramels!

This was a popular science with the teens and a great program for the fall!
Caramel science is easy to set up, just find a good caramel recipe, gather the supplies, and taste test some caramel! (This is completely necessary to the science)
With caramel, there are some really great scientific aspects to cover. These include:

• Caramelization
• Different stages of candy
• How temperature effects the process
• The reason caramels are that color
• Adding sea salt to the finished candy and what that does
• The chemical reactions happening in the heating of the sugar

Adding sea salt to the finished candy was really a cool step, because the teens all thought it would ruin the candy! After explaining that salt can actually enhance flavors and comparing adding sea salt to chocolate covered pretzels and the balance of sweet and salty, they were okay with adding sea salt. This also opened up an interesting discussion about taste buds and how that works and they got to try something new. After a taste test between regular and salted caramels, most preferred the caramels with sea salt!

Here are some good links for caramels!

http://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/candy/recipe-caramels.html

http://chemconfections.blogspot.com/2011/01/caramel-delicious-science-experiment.html

 

 

Dawn States: sea salt caramels are the best...because...SCIENCE!

 

Questions? Email me or leave a comment! dstates@yorklibraries.org