I’m leery of downloading documents from the web.
Does anyone know the balanced chemical equation for chocolate chip cookies?
There are a great many different chemical processes that occur in the process of baking cookies, and there are a great many different products which could reasonably be called “chocolate chip cookies”. I don’t understand the question.
Take the classic Nestlé recipe (no nuts).
White sugar is C[sub]12[/sub]H[sub]22[/sub]O[sub]11[/sub]. Baking soda is (I think) NaHCO[sub]3[/sub]. All of the other ingredients are compounds or mixtures of compounds. When the chemical formulas are strung together in a balanced equation, there will be chemical formulas on both sides that show the reactions of the chemicals on the left to produce the chemicals on the right.
So the question is, what is the balanced chemical equation for chocolate chip cookies?
Technically, a valid chemical equation does not have to have the individual atomic structures.
For instance, I could say
sugars + oxygen <-> H20 + C02 + energy
That’s what happens when your body metabolizes the cookie, though it does it via dozens of smaller steps.
Or, I could say
chocolate chips + cookie dough + heat -> cookie
Also valid. Only thing you gotta keep in mind is that you need to include every element, and you also need to make the arrows bidirectional for reactions that are reversible. Note I have a bidirectional arrow for the sugar metabolism (you can combine energy, H20, and O2 to get the sugars back) but you cannot convert a cookie back into chocolate chips, dough, and heat. The reason the second reaction is irreversible is too complex to describe here.
But, in any case, the equation for the whole cookie would be enormous. You must realize there are biological components in that cookie, and that means a real equation would need tens of thousands of terms.
That’s why I’m asking here. If it were like 2H[sub]2[/sub] + O[sub]2[/sub] → 2H[sub]2[/sub]O, I could figure it out.
I didn’t know it would be that enormous! :eek:
The eggs in the cookie are actual the embryos for an entire flying animal. They contain all the information needed, and developing cellular structures. The ground wheat in the flour is the seed for a complex plant. Even the butter, while mostly relatively simple forms of fat, probably contains traces of the milk used.
You are wanting a chemical equation that has every bonded chain for the cookie specified. Even relatively simple living cells that modern science has studied exhaustively, such as E-coli, need about 20,000-30,000 unique components to function. The egg and wheat are eukaryotic cells that are considerably more complex.
The reason I happen to know about this problem is one time I asked the question : if you had the technology to build things atom by atom (called molecular manufacturing or nanotechnology), could you manufacture anything, even things like a slice of pizza or a chocolate chip cookie?
You could in fact manufacture things like that, but the process would be incredibly complex. Just the data files alone to specify all the components of something like a food product derived from biology would probably require so much physical space to store that even with molecular scale computers, the files would occupy significant amounts of physical space.
If this is a homework question, give an example of the format the answer needs to be in, and someone here could take a stab at it.
Yeah, it’s for my Home Ec class! 
No, it’s not a homework question. Things like this just pop into my head.
The question is like asking which specific shade of yellow paint was used to color the sun.
It’s not even wrong.
IANAC, but I would think a chocolate chip cookie would be a mixture rather than a single chemical compound.
You might want to read up on the Maillard reaction, which is the process that causes amino acids and sugars to turn brown and toasty when heated.
I’ll never look at a chocolate chip cookie the same way again…
No they don’t. The “eggs” used in cooking are unfertilized ova. Just like in humans, when there is no input from a father, the result is no life.
An unfertilized ovum is also alive (just not for as long as a fertilized one plus the product of its development) and it’s not as if being fertilized means an egg cannot be used for cooking. I’m reasonably sure those I get whenever I visit my uncle have a chance of being fertilized…
Actually pretty simple on a macro quantum scale.
Chocolate chips are the only active ingredient (Overly simplified, I realize there are different “flavor” chips in different states, up/down etc) , everything else is just inert filler meant to keep the chips separated so as to avoid a chain reaction chocolate melt down ( Most other flavored chips I’ve found non-fissible)…
Uh, baking cookies is NOT a chemical change, it is a physical change. There is no chemical formula for a physical change.
Man, you go to a tough school! We just made celery with peanut butter on it.
Baking isn’t just a physical change - there is lots of chemistry.
Malliard reactions, as noted, gives browning and complex caramel flavours. Carbon dioxide is released by the heat activated raising agents to make cookies fluffy. Proteins (glutens and albumen) denature and bind to lock structures in place so it does not collapse. Moisture is driven off. Fats melt and distribute. Sugars change with heat in other ways, too. It is just all very complex.
But yummy.
The other difficulty is, as I mentioned, that there is tremendous variety in what can be called a “chocolate chip cookie”. If you take a textbook-example chemical equation, like 2H[sub]2[/sub] + 1O[sub]2[/sub] <-> 2 H[sub]2[/sub]O, we can say that that’s balanced, because there’s the same amount of everything on both sides, and if you (say) increase the amount of hydrogen you start with relative to the other ingredient, then what you’re left with won’t be just water (you’ll end up with some mixture of water and elemental hydrogen). But if you take the recipe for Nestle’s chocolate chip cookies, but use only half the sucrose, then what you produce will still be chocolate chip cookies. They might be bad cookies, but they’ll still be cookies. If you can vary the proportions like that and still get (in some sense) the same thing, then it’s hard to say what is meant by an equation being balanced.
I think what the OP is really asking is “does the science of chemistry cover subjects like baking a chocolate chip cookie”. It does, and Malliard reactions and protein chain denaturing explain specific parts of the baking process. However, a simple cookie is far, far, far too complex to actually drill down and explain exactly what is happening in every detail.
(note that part of the limitation is us : I cannot write down a list of 100,000 ingredients very rapidly. however, intelligent beings that are smarter and faster than humans could do such a task easily)
i don’t know where it is, but I have a recipe for chocolate chip cookies written as if it’s a lab experiment in chemistry.
It’s great, but it’s a joke, of course, since it would be like a recipe for a automobile. A chocolate chip cookie is an assemblage, even if you don’t count the chips, and not a homogeneous substance.
Perhaps you could express it as a ratio. Most cookies are 3 parts flour, 2 parts fat and 1 part sugar.