Simon Donnaway

Fun with Funnel Cakes

“Serves 6-8 people”

Ingredients:
● 494.4 grams of milk (2 cups)
● 1 egg, beaten
● 4.2 grams of vanilla extract (1 teaspoon)
● 500 grams of all purpose flour (2 cups)
● 5 grams of salt (1 teaspoon)
● 6 grams of baking soda (1 teaspoon)
● 12 grams of sugar (1 tablespoon)
● 56.7 grams of butter (4 tablespoons)

Instructions:
1. Combine milk, egg, vanilla in a large bowl.
2. In a separate bowl, combine flour, salt, baking soda, and sugar and gradually add
to wet ingredients.
3. Beat with a mixer until a smooth batter forms.
4. Add in melted butter.
5. Pour batter into a funnel or squeeze bottle while using your index finger to stop
the flow of the batter. Bring the funnel over the hot oil (375°) and release your
 finger to start a stream of batter while moving the funnel in a circular motion to
create spiral-like shapes.
6. Fry for 1 minutes on each side or until golden brown and slightly puffed.

Experiment:
To try and create the optimal funnel cake I decided to experiment with different types of
oil; peanut, soybean, and canola oil to see which one makes the most crisp funnel cake. To
conduct this experiment I cooked a total of 6 funnel cakes, all from the same batch of batter. I
made two in each type of oil cooking them each for 1 minute on each side exactly then pulling
them out. Then I initiated a qualitative taste test with my classmates. My taste test concluded
that peanut oil, created the most crisp funnel cake while canola oil created the least crisp funnel
cake. Overall people prefered the funnel cake fried in soybean oil, which was in the middle as
far as crispness.

Option A: Canola oil

Option B: Soybean oil
Option C: Peanut oil

Why is this?:
Frying works because when the substance is submerged into the hot oil its surface
becomes dehydrated, then maillard reactions caused by the oil break down the sugars and
proteins creating complex flavors and that golden brown color. You get different results from oils
with different fat contents. For instance in this experiment the reason peanut oil created the
crispest funnel cake has to do with its saturated fat content. Saturated fat allows for the best
frying because it stays more stable at high temperatures. Saturated fats are more stable
because they contain more hydrogen atoms, this directly correlates to the smoke point. The
more hydrogen atoms present, the more lineair your fat molecules become causing them to
pack more densely because of stronger intermolecular reactions. This results in peanut oil being
most stable at 375° since it has the most effective molecular structure, creating the most
complete reaction between the oil and the funnel cake

Personal commentary:
I noticed something strange kept occurring throughout my tests. The different types of oil
were affecting how well the batter floated. With canola oil the batter would float on top as it
should, but with the peanut and soybean I had a problem with it sticking to the bottom. Since I
used the same batch of batter throughout the test that couldn’t have been my inconsistency.
This made me interested and I began to look into the densities of each oil to see if that was
causing these results. Soybean oil was the most dense of the group which does not explain my
results because the batter sunk in this oil. The next thing I looked into was the different oils
viscosity. This didn’t answer my question either, peanut oil had the highest viscosity at 71.3℉
followed by canola then soybean. The only way viscosity could still be the reason would be heat
affected the viscosity of peanut oil and soybean oil more than canola and at a frying
temperature of 375℉. But this is unlikely and needs further testing to confirm.