linr2
Oct 23, 2018
Undergraduate / Cooking is science and science is cooking. Common App Essay on Cooking (Prompt 1) [3]
This is my first post here and I would really like some feedback on my essay. I'm also unsure of what to use as a title.
Prompt: "Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story."
There are three rules for a great TV show. It has to hold my attention. It makes me want to watch the next episode instead of doing my homework and each episode takes me on a new adventure. For me, Iron Chef America checked off all the boxes for great TV. What better than to watch my favourite chefs, like Bobby Flay, duke it out over challenges based around a theme ingredient? From one ingredient, Chef Flay would take me on a journey through American, Asian, and Italian cuisine and show something new every time. Inspired by this, I began my own journeys through cooking and it was during these that I realized that I approach cooking much the same way that I approach the rest of my life.
To me, cooking is a science: the chemical reaction between ingredients that produce a dish. Each and every dish begins with a hypothesis where I consider what potential flavours might work well together. In one of my experiments with butternut squash soup, I investigated if adding five-spice powder would add an Asian flair to the dish that would improve the overall flavour. I conducted numerous trials in which the amount of seasoning, proportion of ingredients, addition of other spices like ginger, or time of cooking were varied to determine whether or not a flavour combination was effective. Creating a tasty dish is the goal but for me, understanding why the dish was tasty was the true science. Whether it be because the spices overpowered the rest of the dish or the vegetable mixture worked well in the squash soup, there was always something to be learned in each test. Cooking is all about precision, analysis and adapting based on the results. Cooking is just delicious chemistry.
Cooking is science, but, to me, science is also cooking. The Canadian Young Physicists Tournament is a competition where students examine the physics behind various phenomena and conduct experiments on them. One of these problems was to investigate water bottle flips. The general recipe for a successful bottle flip is to use one's hand to flip a bottle that's one-third full. But this recipe serves only as a guide. I create the final result. Like I learned from Iron Chef America, if cooking was just about getting the meat to the right temperature then everyone would have perfect steaks every day at every restaurant. But it's not that simple. A successful dish must consider all the different elements and pairings. Science is much the same. I experimented with different launch forces, launch methods, volumes of water and even bottle types in order to better understand the mechanics of bottle flipping. What combination of these produced the best results? It was important to me not only to understand what made a bottle flip successful but also what caused it to fail. Failure meant looking beyond the obvious and beyond what was known. Failure occured because questions were asked, results were doubted and uncertainties emerged. Because of failure, I could put together what was learned from both it and success to explain the bottle flip phenomena.
To many, food and cooking is just another inevitable part of our daily routines. Something that has to be done every day, but I think there is so much more to cooking. Cooking is an endless realm of exploration and experimentation and has shown me that the rest of the world is just the same.
This is my first post here and I would really like some feedback on my essay. I'm also unsure of what to use as a title.
Prompt: "Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story."
my culinary JOURNEY
There are three rules for a great TV show. It has to hold my attention. It makes me want to watch the next episode instead of doing my homework and each episode takes me on a new adventure. For me, Iron Chef America checked off all the boxes for great TV. What better than to watch my favourite chefs, like Bobby Flay, duke it out over challenges based around a theme ingredient? From one ingredient, Chef Flay would take me on a journey through American, Asian, and Italian cuisine and show something new every time. Inspired by this, I began my own journeys through cooking and it was during these that I realized that I approach cooking much the same way that I approach the rest of my life.
To me, cooking is a science: the chemical reaction between ingredients that produce a dish. Each and every dish begins with a hypothesis where I consider what potential flavours might work well together. In one of my experiments with butternut squash soup, I investigated if adding five-spice powder would add an Asian flair to the dish that would improve the overall flavour. I conducted numerous trials in which the amount of seasoning, proportion of ingredients, addition of other spices like ginger, or time of cooking were varied to determine whether or not a flavour combination was effective. Creating a tasty dish is the goal but for me, understanding why the dish was tasty was the true science. Whether it be because the spices overpowered the rest of the dish or the vegetable mixture worked well in the squash soup, there was always something to be learned in each test. Cooking is all about precision, analysis and adapting based on the results. Cooking is just delicious chemistry.
Cooking is science, but, to me, science is also cooking. The Canadian Young Physicists Tournament is a competition where students examine the physics behind various phenomena and conduct experiments on them. One of these problems was to investigate water bottle flips. The general recipe for a successful bottle flip is to use one's hand to flip a bottle that's one-third full. But this recipe serves only as a guide. I create the final result. Like I learned from Iron Chef America, if cooking was just about getting the meat to the right temperature then everyone would have perfect steaks every day at every restaurant. But it's not that simple. A successful dish must consider all the different elements and pairings. Science is much the same. I experimented with different launch forces, launch methods, volumes of water and even bottle types in order to better understand the mechanics of bottle flipping. What combination of these produced the best results? It was important to me not only to understand what made a bottle flip successful but also what caused it to fail. Failure meant looking beyond the obvious and beyond what was known. Failure occured because questions were asked, results were doubted and uncertainties emerged. Because of failure, I could put together what was learned from both it and success to explain the bottle flip phenomena.
To many, food and cooking is just another inevitable part of our daily routines. Something that has to be done every day, but I think there is so much more to cooking. Cooking is an endless realm of exploration and experimentation and has shown me that the rest of the world is just the same.
