Subtitles section Play video
-
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.
