Saturday, July 2, 2022
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This week was filled with mostly researching on what I'll be doing for the rest of the internship as well as getting ready for conferences in October! For the majority of the internship, I'll be focusing on one specific food: Maja Blanca! Maja Blanca is a Filipino Coconut Pudding dessert filled with coconut milk, cow milk, and corn with coconut shreds on top! The most interesting part about it, is that its an example of an edible non-newtonian fluid. The way Maja Blanca gets its shape is through the cornstarch we add while we heat the milk mixture. This allows the milk to gelate in a certain way which becomes very interesting from a rheological standpoint.
This past week, I've been focusing on experimenting on different types of milk and how they interact with the cornstarch. Interestingly enough, each type of milk had different reactions that what I first hypothesized. I came in thinking that one type of milk would have all the rheological traits while the rest would have less of the traits I was looking for. Hopefully, I'll have all the details fleshed out by the end of the internship, so stay tuned!
Justin Andre Avendaño