Just ask the kids from the Walder Kitchen Science Vegetable Soup exploration today, Sunday May 11th!
Biology, Chemistry and Physics!
We started off by viewing the streaming videos from the International Space Station and learning about the Earth's atmosphere. When not directly involved with learning about vegetables and cooking our soup, we tracked the ISS using the global tracker over both hemispheres and witnessed both Sunday's sunset and Monday morning's sunrise.
Ah! But what does atmosphere have to do with cooking vegetable soup? Plenty! Atmospheric pressure relates to boiling point which was demonstrated by shaking a soda bottle and slowly opening the cover. The Earth's atmosphere as seen by the ISS boils water at 100C at sea level. But what about on the top of Mount Everest? And what about on the shore of the Dead Sea? The same veggie soup is cooked more quickly at the Dead Sea than at sea level and more quickly at sea level than at the top of Mount Everest.
Enter, the pressure cooker! We compared a pressure cooker to a standard pot, described its features needed to cooked the veggie soup under pressure. So instead of allowing all that wonderful heat laden steam when boiling is achieved, the cooker's lid locks the evaporate in; causing the boiling to rise, causing the water to absorb more heat from the stove and forcing that heat into the food because it cannot escape!
And that is not all! Oh no, that is not all!
We also learned that heat cooking (heat transfer) takes place on the surface of the food. So the more surface the food has, the faster the food cooks. And how, pray tell, does one increase the surface area of veggies for soup? Chop, chop, chop!
We had a great time peeling and chopping our carrots and potatoes and onions and celery and mushrooms to increase their surface area to speed up the cooking process which was further sped up by increasing the atmospheric pressure in the pot!
When Rabbi Weiner announced that it was time to increase the veggies surface area, our 5th and 6th grade participants knew exactly what to do! Cut and chop away!
We also learned that the incense spices in the Beit Hamikdash (Ancient Jewish Temple in Jerusalem) were chopped and crushed to burn well and smell really good! All the while the Kohanim (Priests) chopped, they chanted "We chop it well, very well we chop!" (היטב הדק, הדק היטב).
But, of course, all this chopping took place after we examined our variety of vegetables and learned about leves, root systems, transpiration, respiration, and nutrient storage and photosynthesis.
And after stirring our biology together with the physics we added a dash of chemistry and talk about the chemicals released by onions when applying a mechanical force with a knife and cutting into its cells.
All is a day's soup.
We finished our session 2 hours later enjoying a healthy bowl of soup watching Monday morning's sunrise over the Sea of Japan from the International Space Station.
Everybody wants to know what's cooking next time in the Walder Kitchen of Science.
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