Pancakes fluff

Sofia Codorniz
Biology class 9th
Mr. Ruiz
Feb 22, 2023

Introduction:

Analyses of starch grains on 30,000-year-old grinding tools suggest that Stone Age cooks were
making flour out of cattails and ferns. Researchers guess it was likely mixed with water and
baked on a hot, possibly greased, rock. The result may have been more akin to hardtack than the
modern crepe, hotcake, or flapjack, but the idea was the same. A flat cake, made from batter and
fried. Pancakes are clearly an ancient form of food, as evidenced by their ubiquity in cultural
traditions across the globe. Ancient Greeks and Romans ate pancakes, sweetened with drops of
honey, and Elizabethans ate them flavored with spices, rosewater, sherry, and apples. In the
American colonies, pancakes were known as “Johnny Cakes”, or “Flapjacks” which were made
with buckwheat or cornmeal. Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery, which is her American
cookbook published in 1796, has two recipes for pancakes. One for “Johnny Cake”, which calls
for milk and “Indian SlapJack”, which drops the molasses, but adds four eggs. The four
macromolecules are carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids. Carbohydrates are sugar
molecules, Proteins are molecules made up out of amino acids, lipids are waxy, or oily
compounds that are soluble in organic solvents and insoluble in polar solvents such as water, and
nucleic acids are a complex organic substance present in living cells, especially DNA or RNA,
whose molecules consist of many nucleotides linked in a long chain. The nucleic acids that are
present in this lab are milk, butter, and eggs. Eggs contain a store of nucleic acid in its
cytoplasm, milk contains mainly RNA and nucleotides, and butter too. The proteins that are
present in this lab are flour, milk, eggs, and a little bit of butter. Flour contains 13g of protein,
milk contains 8g, eggs contain 6g, and butter contains 0.1g. The lipids that are present in this lab
are butter, flour, milk, and eggs. Triglycerides make up more than 95 percent of lipids in the diet
and are commonly found in butter, milk, etc. Flour only contains 1.2g of a lipid, and eggs contain
5g. Finally, the only carbohydrates that are present in this lab are flour and milk because
Carbohydrates take the form of lactose in milk. Lactose is a natural sugar that provides energy to
the body.
Objective:
The purpose of this experiment is to see which pancake will turn out to be fluffier if you put 1
cup of milk for one, and ½ cup of milk for one.

Hypothesis:
If dividing the amount of milk poured into the pancake, then the pancake will be approximately
fluffier than the other.

Material list:
-2 frying pans
-2 Mixing Bowls
-Mixer
-Spatula
-Measuring cups
-2 eggs
-2 tablespoons of butter
-1 Cup of milk
-½ cups of milk
-2 cups of pancake flour
-¼ of butter
- Ruler
- Spoon

Procedure:
1. Collect 2 frying pans and two bowls.
 2. Begin with pouring 2 cups of pancake flour into one mixing bowl.
3. Set the 2 eggs and 2 tablespoons of butter into one mixing bowl.
4. Insert 1 cup of milk into one bowl. (Milk #1)
5. Turn on the stove with heat of 5 and wait for 5 minutes.
6. Mix the bowl.
7. Set a frying pan with ¼ of butter in them and let melt for 30 sec with heat at 5.
8. Begin to pour 1 cup of batter into the frying pan and spread it out with a spoon.
9. Once bubbles start to appear, wait for 3 minutes, and flip it to the other side using a
spatula and wait about 1 minute.
10. When both sides of the pancakes are golden, proceed to place them onto plates.
11. Repeat steps 7,8,9 and 10 until the batch is done.
12. Set pancakes onto a plate.
13. Measure this batch of pancakes.
14. Repeat all the steps, but instead of having 1 cup of milk only pour ½ a cup.
15. After ½ a cup batch is done measuring this batch.

Data/result/observations:

Pancakes 1 2 3

Milk #1 1 cup 1 cup 1 cup

Milk #2 ½ cups ½ cups ½ cups

Pancakes 1 2 3

Milk #1 1.4 cm 1.5 cm 1.3 cm

Milk #2 .8 mm 1 cm .9 mm

Figure 1:
½ cup:

1 cup:
Figure 2: A line graph for the number of pancakes (x axis), and how tall they are (y axis).

Qualitative results: The pancakes that consisted of 1 cup of milk in it were getting way bigger
and thicker than the other when they were on the frying pan. Meanwhile the pancakes with the ½
cup of milk were getting thinner and flatter. When opening the bigger pancakes, they were
approximately very soft and fluffier and when opening flat ones, they were dry and consisted of
a very little amount of fluffiness.

Conclusion:

It was determined that the pancakes that had ½ of milk in them were not fluffy. And the
pancakes that consisted of 1 cup of milk had a bigger impact. This concludes that the stated
hypothesis was a success because if you add more milk, the fluffier it gets. Some things that
would have made this lab better is pouring a higher amount of milk, instead of ½ and 1 cup
because they were almost the same measurement when graphing them. An improvement for
measuring the two stacks of pancakes is that they were measured in height, and they were in a
good shape so that gave an easier probability to measure them correctly. Many improvements
could have been added to this lab related to the amount of carbohydrates to make the pancakes
slightly interesting.
Work cited:

Rupp, Rebecca. The Long, Surprising History of Pancakes. 02/27/18