Our experiment was about what types of fuel that bread baking yeast will produce the most carbon dioxide consuming. We had 5 plastic bottles and chose 5 fuel sources; sugar, honey, molasses, corn syrup, and all purpose flour.
Into each plastic bottle we poured 1 tsp. of yeast, 1 TBS. fuel, and 1/4 cup warm water.
We secured a balloon onto the top of each bottle to capture carbon dioxide.
We labeled the bottles as we went.
Within 5 minutes of setting up, the sugar bottle was in the lead.
At the 15 minute mark I noticed that some of the balloons had teeny tiny holes in the stem portion of the balloons. I used rubber bands to seal off the stems.
I took a picture of the bottles after 30 minutes,.....
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| 1/2 hour |
... At 1 hour,...
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| 1 hour |
... And at 3 hours.
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| 3 hours |
The next day I blew up the balloons for the children to play with. We discovered that one of the balloons had a teeny tiny hole on the top of the balloon. I didn't know which bottle it had come off. My first thought was that the holey balloon had been on the bottle with flour. I really had expected the flour balloon to do better than it did.
The next day I ran the experiment again, with a bottle with flour as fuel, and a bottle with sugar to act as a control.
After 4 hours,....
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| 4 hours |
There you have it folks, yeast really likes simple carbohydrates.
Bread baking yeast produced about the same amount of carbon dioxide with each of the sweeteners that we tried. There didn't appear to be any significant difference between using sugar, honey, molasses, or corn syrup as fuel. Sugar had a little head start, but after an hour the rest caught up.
Let us know how we could improve this experiment! If you have any ideas tell us in the comment section!
8 comments:
Hello, I am Roxy and I found your Blog on My Cubby Crafts, so I thought I better come say hi!
What a great experiment and interesting. Bread is truly wonderful. I enjoy making bread! I am going to check out a few other of your posts!
Blessings, Roxy
Thank you for coming to say, "Hi!" I hope you feel welcome here at Simple Inspirations. :)
What a fun experiment! :) Thank you for sharing about it! If we had some balloons, it would be interesting to try that here with the kids. I recently made some experimental "Cloud Dough" (as it was called in the recipe I used... similar to play dough when it's done), made from just two ingredients - hair conditioner and corn starch. My only problem with it was the conditioner I used was way too overpowering in its scent...:( I'm a bit sensitive to things like that, so it gave me a headache as I was making it with the kids! Oh well. It still turned out pretty nice, and they had fun with it. :) We added some food coloring to some of it. You should give it a try! I would recommend using a cheap Dollar store brand that has a nice, mild scent, though, of course. :)
What a neat recipe, Sunshine Country! That sounds like a really fun dough. I will keep in mind to use a conditioner with a fragrance that is not obnoxious. Thank you for sharing this idea and the tip about the scent. :)
That is such a fantastic experiment to do with your family! I would have thought the flour would have done better to. Just needed that extra sweetness.
Thank you for the comment, Jennifer! I was considering checking the nutrition facts of the flour. Maybe, if a used an amount of flour with the equivalent amount of carbohydrates to the other sweeteners, it would produce the same amount of gasses?
What a fun experiment! I just might "steal" this idea!
It was a lot of fun, Annie. I hope you have as much fun with this experiment as we did. :)
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