“Many cookbooks teach this technique and it is widely used, but when we searched the academic literature, we couldn’t find any detailed scientific explanations, we set out to provide one”. said Zhao Pan, a mechanical and mechatronics engineering professor at the University of Waterloo, who is also the director of the Pan-Lab: An Interdisciplinary Kitchen for Fluid Physics at Waterloo. “We set out to provide one.”
The project involved experiments placing wet paper, moistened chopsticks and water droplets in hot oil, with the results recorded using sensitive microphones and high-speed cameras.
Researchers found the physics of frying food far more complex than they anticipated. To simplify their tests, they used moist pieces of paper and, later, water droplets as stand-ins for actual food.
The results have potential applications in scientific fields such as acoustic sensing of aerosol generation to inexpensively measure air pollution, new technology the researchers are now working on.
Pan, director of the Pan-Lab: An Interdisciplinary Kitchen for Fluid Physics at Waterloo, said the tests also showed that the trick used by deep-frying cooks works quite well.
“This simple eye and ear measurement is accurate to within about five to 10 per cent, which is pretty good when we consider that a typical temperature for frying food is higher than 150 degrees Celsius,” Pan said.
A paper on the project, Morphology of bubble dynamics and sound in heated oil, appears in the journal Physics of Fluids. Rafsan Rabbi, Som Dutta and John Allen also contributed.
See the full story on Waterloo News.