Fats, Oils, EmulsionsFCS 175- Lab # 7Jacki Raivo 10/17/11Introduction: Invisible Fat: Fat that can’t be seen, but is present in a food.Visible Fat: Obvious fat that can be seen with the naked eye.Linoleic Acid: an unsaturated fatty acid, essential to the human diet (Answers.com.)Emulsion: A liquid dispersed in an immiscible liquid in droplets larger than colloidal size (Merriam-Webster.)Plasticity: Refers to a solid and a liquid suspended together in a crystal network. Usually easily molded Ex. Butter.Rancid:having a rank, unpleasant, stale smell or taste, as throughdecomposition, especially of fats or oil: rancid butter (Dictionary.com.)Methods and Results: In lab True French, Tomato French, Mayo and pie crusts were made. Group five made a True French Dressing simply by whisking all the ingredients together. Nothing complicated. It turned out pretty good but a little lumpy. A hand mixer would have been better but it didn’t affect the taste. I don’t prefer many salad dressings so I didn’t like it but that’s a personal preference. The pie crusts were made using oil, butter or lard. Group five prepared a butter pie crust by freezing the butter and cutting it into the dry ingredients till course. The purpose of cutting the cold butter into the dough is so that when it is cooked the butter melts and leaves air pockets which, in turn, give a flakey buttery end product. There wasn’t a pie cutter around so forks were used to cut the butter into the dough, which made it inconsistent. We also used all-purpose gluten free flour instead of regular, which gave a really crumbly not pleasant tasting product. It was a good lesson in gluten free baking, however, since other ingredients are needed to counteract the lack of gluten.Discussion: A semi permanent emulsion is one that doesn’t last, for example an Italian dressing that needs to be shaken up before use. A permanent emulsion is one that changes the structure of individual ingredients, like mayonnaise. There are two main forms of fat, invisible and visible. Invisible fat refers to fat that is naturally present in a food like whole milk, meat, fish, poultry, nuts and seeds. This fat is mostly saturated fat. Visible fats refer to fats you can see like butter, shortening, lard, cooking oil or margarine. The main types of oil used are as follow: soybean, cottonseed, olive, canola, sunflower, safflower, peanut, corn, palm, palm kernel and coconut oils.Some cost factors with fat types are the amount of saturated and unsaturated fats, what it is madefrom –margarine from canola oil, butter from animal fat—and the trans fats in a product. Trans fats are unhealthy scary fats that are a result of hydrogenation. Hydrogenation is a process that bubbles hydrogen through a catalyst to break the bonds in an unsaturated fat. This makes it more stable and more solid at room temp also lessening the oxidation of a product. It is, however, bad for ones heart. Summary: From this lab I gathered that canola oil is actually good for you, I don’t actually like salad dressings and I’m glad I use coconut oil in a lot of my baking. I think that whether you use margarine or butter it really doesn’t matter what types of fat there are as long as it is in moderation. Quite frankly, I think they both don’t help in a healthy stand point. What I would love to have in my future is to live on alavender farm and make my own cheese and butter so this lab helped me learn a bit more for that. I also already use coconut oil in frosting for cupcakes because it is solid at room temp and adds a nice mouth-feel and firmness to my frosting which I find desirable in a perfect cupcake. No one likes runny frosting.
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