Why do we cook & bake in the classroom?
— The kitchen is, for the most part, completed!!! And, doesn’t the burned wood (Shou sugi ban) look great? We are just waiting on the jets to convert the oven to natural gas 🙂 —
The smell of freshly baked bread permeates the classroom as students are busy with their daily tasks. With each breath, the students create memories, associating learning with, simply put, an aroma that magically puts a smile on the majority of us.
Have you ever stood outside a bakery and watched people walk by?
Inevitably, even the busiest of people often turn their heads toward the bakery. I’ve noticed young people, earphones in, and hoodie up, avert their eyes for even a moment as they pass a bakery. I am sure it is the luring smell of the bakery easing through every crack in the building and finally surrounding every passerby. And yes, I have seen more smiles appear on the faces of people passing a bakery than any other shop, based on minimal, but actual experience!
Just as the bread is browning, sugars combine with amino acids to form tasty golden and umber complexes throwing off lots of volatile aromatic compounds. These compounds float through the kitchen air and into your nostrils and finally into the olfactory bulb in your brain, triggering all kinds of memories.
If your bread has yeast, you will be creating an even more enticing aromatic experience from the microbe ethyl ester. These are a compound produced by yeast that is quantitatively the primary ester found in beer and wine! The yeast cells produce chemicals that break down during baking into delicious-smelling aromatics. The longer the fermentation, the more pronounced the yeast flavors become since the microbes have more time to produce these compounds.
I’m quite sure that we don’t need the research to know this. Still, scientists at the University of Southern Brittany in France found that shoppers were more likely to alert a random passerby that they had dropped a belonging if, at the time, they were also passing a bakery giving off the sweet scent of baking bread.
The findings, published in the Journal of Social
Psychology, suggest that certain smells can trigger a more positive mood, which leads to a greater degree of altruism in both strangers and family.
While other studies have connected pleasant smells to better moods, the new study sought to make a concrete tie between aroma and good deeds. Additionally, cooking with children of any age is an opportunity to affirm what parents teach at home about nutrition education, and learning how to plan meals, trying new foods, and lifelong skills which include math!
There you have it.
We cook and bake in the classroom, on a regular basis if not daily, to create better moods, kinder actions, and again, associate these loving olfactory experiences with a lifelong love of learning.
