Why does the buttercream for an Oreo cake always stay on the same side? Believe it or not, but students at MIT put the famous cookie into a series of tests to investigate the matter.
Posted at 7:49
Updated at 11:26 am
“There’s this wonderful problem of trying to separate the cream between the two biscuits, and it proves difficult,” says Max Van, an undergraduate student. who participated in the experiment.
After putting the famous cookies to the test, the students found that the force required to separate the cookies was equivalent to that used when we turned a knob and 1/10 of that used to open a bottle. Also, the breaking strength is higher than that of cream cheese or peanut butter, but similar to that of mozzarella cheese. In the end, the students decided that cookies that were less fresh were more likely to be separated better.
Conclusion ? Young researchers decided that the unequal separation was a matter of the manufacturing process. Videos of the manufacturing process show that the cream is deposited in the first biscuit, and then the second biscuit is deposited. This short delay may explain that the fat sticks better to the first cookie,” explains Crystal Owens, a doctoral student at MIT.
In short, this far from ordinary experience makes rheology, the branch of mechanics that consists in the study of the resistance of materials to stress and deformation, more accessible. Notice to interested parties: Oreometer plans can be found at github.
Source: MIT