Food Theory: Don't Trust Your Cake!

writers listen up we're developing a new game called portal this is just a spitball session so there are no bad ideas go [Music] cakes me cake it's delicious and mysterious how's this for a catchphrase the cake is a lie because it is you know boxed cakes say that you need to put in eggs but it's not true why is there a baker in here do any of our staff writers have any input nope cause it's five o'clock let's just go with the cake things no bad ideas right all right see you monday oh dear this game was already pretty weird to begin with you're doing very well [Music] hello internet welcome to food theory the only show that contains 100 of your daily recommended dosage of the scientific method plus it's part of a balanced breakfast loyal theorists i can't quite call myself a master chef no matter how many times i've watched gordon ramsay tell people that their food tastes like poo what are you an idiot sandwich nope it takes just about all of my culinary skill to make something from a box which i do quite well if i say so myself my kraft macaroni and cheese is indeed the cheesiest my rice krispies consistently snap crackle and pop then i could even pull off a boxed cake mix if i had to after all i gotta do is add some water and oil and eggs ah seriously gotta add three additional ingredients and one of them is eggs which you know you gotta crack and then the shell's gonna get in there ugh what do i look like young anthony bourdain whoa is that really what he looked like back in the day wow that's a beautiful head of hair the point is i'm a horribly lazy chef but i heard a rumor that would allow me to have my cake and eat it too quite literally remain a horribly lazy chef but also be able to make boxed cake mixes like a champ in the laziest way possible you see the rumor is that you don't actually have to add eggs at all to certain boxed cake mixes now i don't know if this is true or not that's what we aim to solve today but if it is this could be a game changer because the last time i bought eggs i promptly forgot about them in the back of the fridge for like 25 months and let me assure you the smell was excruciating so today i'm gonna get to the bottom of it once and for all do you actually have to add eggs to boxed cake mixes and if not why the heck would big cake be lying to us about this fact it is making the recipe more complicated and perhaps most importantly of all how many egg puns can i reasonably fit into an episode before you all get exhausted exhausted theorists if we're gonna determine whether or not this confectionary conspiracy is half baked i think it's best we get cracking so the first thing i want to know is whether the rumors are true can a passable cake actually be made without the eggs like why exactly are eggs such a big deal in baking in the first place well it turns out there are a few main reasons why eggs are called foreign baking recipes first eggs affect the volume and density of a cake according to the kitchen.com quote when mixed with sugar like in a cake or cookie batter eggs help trap and hold air not quite as well as whipped egg whites but enough to give the finished product some lightness and lift end quote as the mixer introduces more air into the mixture more and more air bubbles are covered with these proteins that prevent the bubbles from bursting and therefore the whole batter retains more air and gets lighter and fluffier so if we make a cake without eggs well we would expect it to have a thicker denser consistency the egg's second roll is flavor but not in the way that you'd expect the protein found in egg contributes to what's called mayard reactions which create a browned crust with a difference in flavor you've undoubtedly see the handiwork of maillard reactions in a bunch of different foods from cakes to steaks to bread so if we were to bake a cake without eggs presumably we should notice a difference in the taste we shouldn't be getting as brown of a crust around the areas with the most heat which to me might not be that big of a deal but to my parents oh man if they could make a brownie that was just edge just mayard reaction central that's all they'd care about right they love that brown crispy edge i'm more of an ooey gooey center guy myself finally eggs act as an emulsifier in baking recipes now i know that might sound like a big complex word but don't worry it's actually quite egg approachable dang it man that's not even a good pun oh i oh i should have done a poachable the term emulsifier is just a chemistry term for something that helps two liquids mix together and in the case of boxed cake recipes those two liquids are water and vegetable oil considering how water and oil famously don't mix it's especially important to have an emulsifier in this case the egg present when baking a cake otherwise the batter would be a separated mess with a lot of clumps and the final cake would have about as much structural integrity as the tree house i made when i was seven so it seems like eggs do a ton of heavy lifting in baking recipes they're making the cake lighter and fluffier they're adding to the flavor through the mayard reactions they're allowing the ingredients themselves to mix together into a seamless batter so if we bake a cake using zero eggs obviously the result is gonna be some monstrosity that barely resembles a cake right not so fast take a look at the side of the cake mix box there chief notice all those ingredients that sound like they belong on a walter white shopping list die calcium phosphate thiamine mono nitrate egg cetera egg cetera that's right those are all contributing to that betty crocker goodness mmm with distilled monoglycerides just like mom used to make in all seriousness though monoglycerides just so happen to aid emulsification so do propylene glycol mono and diesters of fatty acids that means that even without the addition of any eggs there are still ingredients in the cake mix box ensuring that the oil-based and water-based ingredients are going to be able to bind together in fact pretty much all the strange sounding ingredients on the side of the betty crocker super moist delights french vanilla cake mix box do something that you'd expect the egg to be doing cellulose gum and xantham gum help stabilize the emulsion the distilled monoglycerides i joked about earlier allow the mayard reaction to occur sodium steroid lactolate not only aids emulsification but also increases volume just like an egg would notice how much bigger and fluffier a loaf of bread is when sodium sterile lactolate is included as we go down the list of boxed cake mix ingredients we see the major contributions an egg makes to a recipe emulsification volume taste they're all redundantly covered by ingredients that are already coming in the box so it certainly seems at least from a chemistry perspective that the boxed cake mix has it all under control those additives are doing exactly the same things that the eggs should be doing in the cake batter but here at food theory we're not content to just leave things as theories we're trying to get all the way to food facts and that's why we sent this case to the theorist test kitchen which is totally absolutely 100 definitely a real thing and not just the kitchens of the various members of team theorist we took the same betty crocker super moist delights french vanilla cake mix from earlier and made two cakes one with water vegetable oil and eggs added as instructed on the back of the box and the other without the eggs we only added the oil and the water in mixing the two of them immediately there was a very clear difference in the batter the batter with eggs added was much runnier which makes sense right an egg white is about 90 water after all it also had a much yellower color because duh egg yolks are yellow by contrast the batter without eggs felt very thick felt much stickier the batter clung to the mixer beater when we pulled it out but it's the finished product that really matters here so here's a side-by-side comparison of the cake with eggs included on the left and the cake without eggs over on the right the tops of both cake slices show evidence of mayard reaction browning though a bit more so on the cake with eggs the cake with eggs also cut more cleanly with the knife whereas the cake without eggs was crumblier it's more difficult to get out of the pan in one piece but honestly from initial looks i think they both look pretty delicious it's the interior though where we really start to see the differences the inside of the cake with eggs added had lots of small evenly distributed bubbles where air had gotten trapped and assisted the leavening of the cake you might say that the structure is exemplary or you might not because you're not amused by egg puns compare that to the cake with no eggs and you have much larger crumbs fewer air bubbles and less structural integrity so while it might not look like the greatest slice of cake you ever had i'm gonna go ahead and say that we at least achieved what we set out to do which was to bake something passable besides at the end of the day does it really matter what it looks like it's all about the taste am i right so we took both cakes the cake with eggs as well as the cake without eggs and we handed them out to our theorist guinea pigs i mean the loyal members of team theorist the general feedback was that the cake without eggs was denser and creamier but that there was no pronounced difference in the actual flavor in fact a couple of us actually preferred the more crumbly cake without the eggs so the two cakes were noticeably different eggless cake was denser had less mayard reaction and had less structural stability but the additives inside that boxed cake mix obviously helped to pick up a lot of the slack despite turning out differently the eggless cake was very edible even preferred by some people in a blind taste test so i'm gonna go ahead and declare the rumors to be theorist certified true you do not necessarily have to include an egg in your boxed cake recipe the recipe has been lying to us [Music] stop your pro exercise propaganda right there lazytown turns out you can be lazy while making a cake call me robbie rotten but you don't have to cook by the book adding eggs totally optional who knew feel like my cake world has been turned upside down but i'm still left wondering why why would big cake lie to us i mean those additives are already doing most of the work the eggs and honestly if they just added a bit more of each of those additives you would pretty much eliminate the eggs entirely i mean think of all that time i've wasted buying eggs cracking eggs trying to get the eggshells out of my batter because i'm bad at cracking eggs writing egg themed wise cracks for this video surely there's an explanation for the deception what gives well remember earlier when i told you that this was a rumor i heard well the article that spurred this whole episode was from psychology today and as you might expect there's a psych-based reason behind this lie that big cake keeps shoving down our throats according to psychology today in the earliest days of instant cake mixes you didn't actually have to add the eggs or the oil like you do today the only ingredient you had to add was water then mix it then bake it but much to the chagrin of the food engineers at betty crocker back in the 1950s people weren't buying the cake mixes so the company dispatched some psychologists to figure out why their cake mixes weren't selling off the shelves the sexist conclusion they came to was that housewives felt guilty about how easy it was to bake a cake just by adding water and that they didn't like quote deceiving their husbands and guests something tells me that the real reason they didn't want to make a cake out of a cardboard box is the same reason you probably wouldn't want to make guacamole out of a cardboard box you'd probably be kinda suspicious of the quality and what kind of additives they had to put in to make it work but whatever the real reason was the marketing wizards at betty crocker decided that if they prompted bakers to add an egg they would be more invested in the baking process correlation isn't necessarily causation but dang the cake mixes didn't get more and more popular after bakers were required to add the egg and oil and here we are today here's the most interesting bit of it all though they didn't reformulate the recipe for the cake mix when they started instructing people to add the eggs so the egg that they told people to add wasn't really necessary so there you have it friends the cake truly is a lie but hey that's just a theory a food theory that's all yolks except for the part where i tell you all to subscribe that is guys obviously this is a brand new channel and if we're gonna succeed we need your support i am really enjoying doing these theories i hope you're enjoying watching them but in order for this channel to keep making theories i need you all to subscribe tell me that this is something that you like seeing we launched this channel with five that's right five new episodes and they tackle a whole variety of food related stuff wanted to give you a taste of what you can actually expect to see on this channel it is some wild and wacky stories some business insidery things some really strange episodes about food mascots so don't be shy watch another one right now go back for seconds heck thirds think of food theory as an all you can watch buffet and you are ready to binge eat oh and uh after you've watched all five let me know in the comments which one was your favorite let me know which one you started with and which one you ended with that would actually be really useful for me to know now go on get hit that subscribe button take a big old bite out of it [Music] [Music] you

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Views: 3,141,852

Rating: 4.9525909 out of 5

Keywords: cake, baking, baker, recipe, cake recipe, baking recipe, portal cake, cake decorating, chocolate cake, rosanna pansino, how to cake it, mr cake, nerdy nummies, food, dessert, food science, portal cake recipe, cake design, all about cake, zebra cake recipe, oreo cake recipe, without a recipe, food myth, food myths, food theorists, food theory, game theory, game theorists, film theory, film theorists, matpat, matpat theory, matpat new channel

Id: dulS3GGiJ7M

Length: 13min 38sec (818 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 23 2020