So say you’re ruining yet another batch
of cookies because, who knows, too much butter? not enough flour? didn’t chill the dough
long enough? Could be anything, there’s too many variables
and this is why baking from scratch is hard and I’ll stick with mathematics thank you
very much. But I do know one delicious recipe that’s
hard to get wrong. And by the way this video is in VR180 so use
a headset or look around by moving your phone or dragging the video because today we’re
making Monkeybread. Monkeybread, aka puzzle bread or pull-apart
bread, is a classic american food invented in the 1970s to take advantage of pre-prepared
refrigerated biscuit dough for an easy-to-make snack suitable for groups of children and/or
adults with no plates or utensils necessary. I’ll be making the dough bits round to better
simulate properties of Voronoi diagrams, but the basic idea is that each ball of dough
is like a little cell coated in cinnamon sugar, and large amounts of brown sugar butter. Lots and lots of butter. In the oven all these spheres of dough will
expand and develop facets as they smoosh into each other, so they’re more polygonal and
no longer spheres. What kind of shapes would you expect the cells
to form? Let’s go back to my batch of cookie, and
I’ll use icing to draw the lines where the cookieblobs hit each other. It looks a lot like a Voronoi diagram, which
is a kind of diagram where you start with a bunch of points, or, cookiedough blobs,
and then it’s as if each point spreads out until it gets all the area that’s close
to it, or at least, closer to it than to any other point. If you started with points organized into
a very efficient cookie packing like this, then the Voronoi diagram would look like a
bunch of hexagons, except on the edges where technically the cell includes the slice of
space going infinitely off the cookie sheet, not that I have enough dough for infinitely
large cookies, which just marks another place where mathematical theory is better than the
realities of baking. But for our more randomly placed cookie blob
sheet, the Voronoi cells are irregular polygons, and these look pretty typical for 2D Voronoi
cells. But what about 3D Voronoi cells? There’s many theoretically perfect way to
pack spheres together where they’d expand into perfectly fitting cubes or rhombic dodecahedra
or other fun shapes, but when you toss all the dough balls randomly into a bundt pan
we’ll get more typical random Voronoi cells. I mean it’s not quite mathematically Voronoi-y
because of how dough works and physics but it’s similar enough that our Monkeybread
bits will have that distinctive Voronoi flavor. The Bundt pan, by the way, not only makes
genus 0 baked goods into genus 1 baked goods, but the hole in the middle adds surface area,
which is not only great for having lots of glaze or crust but essential for Monkeybread
in particular so that more cells are on the surface. You eat it by just grabbing a cell and pulling
it apart from the bread, and the toroidal shape means you can pick at it from all sides,
including inside. Bundt pans also provide areas of both negative
and positive curvature to observe, which helps better simulate a comparison to the formation
of epithelial cells, hence the Scutoid connection (more about scutoids next time). Altogether, Monkeybread is quite the mathematical
snack.
Vihart is a "relatively obscure channel?"
I’m confused... About why I didn’t get the notification when this video came out. I need to go watch this now, bye
One time I saw him on a video that had less then 1000 views on a channel with less then (lower than average number of subs) subscribers