Enzymatic browning: We learn things…
This video was made for Food Science class. I have wanted to teach Food Science for years and finally got approval last year to begin teaching it this year. I was so excited to teach this class since I have wanted to teach it since I began teaching. And then, like everything else in 2020, COVID happened. I was now faced with how to teach a class that is mostly hands on experiments in a fully distance learning environment. FUN!!! I started the class with a few live demos. Me with my webcam on my face and my phone on a gorilla pod on my Kitchenaid.
This was the front view. This demo was on the stretch of cheese. So I baked pitas with pizza sauce and different types of mozzarella. The goal was to see how far up it stretched after baking.
This was the view my kids saw on Zoom. Note the watermelon propping up the quilting board so that I could measure the stretch. Also note the extremely tired teacher face trying to make this whole distance thing work. I set the experiment up, placed the pizza’s in the oven and had a super riveting 10 minutes while they baked. Me looking at black boxes, them looking at me being awkward in my kitchen. It was not working. I tried really hard, but without the kids completing the experiment themselves, it was painful. So, I started brainstorming, I needed to get on this whole starting a youtube channel thing ASAP. The baking time would be a 5 second fun timelapse, the measuring would, due to editing and tripod magic, not show the watermelon that I hadn’t had time to cut up yet, but was serving the vital function of propping my quilting board, and quite possibly me, up. I had another demo to do that same week. (Food Science started out with A LOT of demos/experiments. If we were in the classroom, they would have been fun. Also, the kids would do the work and cleanup, and I would be grading, assisting and teaching. As it stood, my kitchen was exploding during 3rd period, and for some completely unexplainable reason, after I had blown my kitchen up for the purposes of school, I felt guilty using school time cleaning up my kitchen, for something I had done for school. Teacher guilt, it is scarily real.
All of that being said, I realized that speeding up footage and not having dead space for baking and such was going to be really important. It would also help if I didn’t have to do back to back live demonstrations for Foods 1 once they needed it. So pre recording was the only option. So far it has worked pretty well. Some of my students have messaged me saying they used things I taught them during Thanksgiving cooking. I’m hoping once I have gotten a good deal of videos done that I can use in class, I can start making more fun videos. At this point, I am recording any cooking that goes on in my house that may be remotely interesting, because content is content.
This video was made as my first time lapse. I had the camera set up on the kitchen counter for 24 hours. When making a super long timelapse you have to remember super fun things like, leaving the lights on in the kitchen overnight, avoiding casting shadows on that area, and making sure the phone you are using is plugged in so the battery doesn’t die. We thankfully keep our old phones instead of trading in so that we can use them as backup cameras or use them if we break our current phones. We ended up getting iPhone 12’s a bit early on our contract so that I could use the wide angle. This video, while not very long or difficult, was one that I honed in a lot of the procedures that I am still using. I learn a bit from every video I film, so this one was super helpful. If you are interested in enzymatic browning and a bit of Food Science, check out the video below.