A recipe that only an engineer could love

Nov 20 16:00 UTC 1997

A friend passed this along, & I thought it might be worth posting here.
I'm including the attribution, but I don't know if this is merely my
friend's source or the actual author.  Someone try the recipe & say
how they came out, OK?   8-{)]

> From: "Michael R. Muha" <mrm@arbortext.com>
> Subject: Engineered Cookies
> 
> Why Engineers Don't Write Recipe Books
> 
> Chocolate Chip Cookies:
> 
> Ingredients:
> 
> 1.) 532.35 cm3 gluten (flour)
> 2.) 4.9 cm3 NaHCO3 (baking Powder)
> 3.) 4.9 cm3 refined halite (salt)
> 4.) 236.6 cm3 partially hydrogenated tallow triglyceride (Crisco)
> 5.) 177.45 cm3 crystalline C12H22O11(Sugar)
> 6.) 177.45 cm3 unrefined C12H22O11 (sugar)
> 7.) 4.9 cm3 methyl ether of protocatechuic aldehyde (vanilla
> flavoring)
> 8.) Two calcium carbonate-encapsulated avian albumen-coated protein
> (eggs)
> 9.) 473.2 cm3 theobroma cacao (cocoa)
> 10.) 236.6 cm3 de-encapsulated legume meats (sieve size #10) (nuts)
> 
> To a 2-L jacketed round reactor vessel (reactor #1) with an overall
> heat transfer coefficient of about 100 Btu/F-ft2-hr, add ingredients
> one, two and three with constant agitation. In a second 2-L reactor
> vessel with a radial flow impeller operating at 100 rpm, add
> ingredients four, five, six, and seven until the mixture is
> homogeneous. To reactor #2, add ingredient eight, followed by three
> equal volumes of the homogeneous mixture in reactor #1. Additionally,
> add ingredient nine and ten slowly, with constant agitation. Care
> must be taken at this point in the reaction to control any
> temperature rise that may be the result of an exothermic reaction.
> 
> Using a screw extrude attached to a #4 nodulizer, place the mixture
> piece-meal on a 316SS sheet (300 x 600 mm). Heat in a 460K oven for
> a period of time that is in agreement with Frank & Johnston's first
> order rate expression (see JACOS, 21, 55), or until golden brown.
> Once the reaction is complete, place the sheet on a 25C heat-transfer
> table, allowing the product to come to equilibrium.

response 2 of 7:

Nov 21 14:26 UTC 1997

Hm.  I recall a recipe like this one being posted on Grex a few years ago.
Rane and some other folks picked it apart on all sorts of technicalities.
It was an interesting discussion.  :)

I checked; this is the only copy of this recipe in the cooking conference.
Dunno about other conferences.

response 4 of 7:

Nov 22 22:20 UTC 1997

It turned up in the humor item too (Grex has lots of arborlink connections,
and arborlink has lots of humor mailing lists).  Rane thinks it was posted
in a previous humor item in agora.

response 6 of 7:

Nov 24 18:35 UTC 1997

(oops, I meant arbortext, not arborlink.  Arg, there are at least 4 arbor___
organizations I'm involved with in some way or another, and it's hard to keep
them all straight.  There's arborweb, the Ann Arbor Observer's website. 
There's arbornet: aka M-Net.  There's arbortext, where several friends work.
And there's arborlink, where I'm doing CGI programming lately.  Sigh.)