(24 Jan 2020) LEAD IN:
The results are finally in for the first chocolate chip cookie bake-off in space.
While looking more or less normal, the best cookies required two hours of baking time last month up at the International Space Station. It takes far less time on Earth, under 20 minutes.
STORY-LINE:
This cookie is one of the first foods baked in space from raw ingredients.
Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano was the master baker in December, radioing down a description as he baked them one by one in the prototype Zero G Oven.
The first cookie – in the oven for 25 minutes at 300 degrees Fahrenheit (149 degrees Celsius) – ended up seriously under-baked.
He more than doubled the baking time for the next two, and the results were still so-so.
The fourth cookie stayed in the oven for two hours, and finally success.
“So this time, I do see some browning,” Parmitano radioed. “I can’t tell you whether it’s cooked all the way or not, but it certainly doesn’t look like cookie dough any more.”
Parmitano cranked the oven up to its maximum 325 degrees F (163 degrees C) for the fifth cookie and baked it for 130 minutes. He reported more success.
The makers of the oven expected a difference in baking time in space, but not that big.
Located near NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Nanoracks designed and built the small electric test oven that was launched to the space station last November. Five frozen raw cookies were already up there.
The Space cookies are frozen in a Houston-area lab, still sealed in individual baking pouches and packed in their spaceflight container, after splashing down two weeks ago in a SpaceX capsule.
As for aroma, the astronauts could smell the cookies when they removed them from the oven, except for the first.
A hotel chain DoubleTree by Hilton provided the cookie dough, the same kind used for cookies offered to hotel guests.
Eating something other than dehydrated or pre packaged food will be particularly important as astronauts head back to the moon and on to Mars.
“If we’re going to be a space-faring society, we’re going to have to learn to cook in space, it’s fairly important to humans. And right now, we don’t have a way of essentially cooking in space. We bring dehydrated food and pre packaged food and add hot water to it, throw it in a microwave and eat it. And we just deal with that for the time but in the future we are gonna want to have fresh vegetables, so grow our own foods, you want to prepare that in appetizing ways and so cookies are certainly appetizing, maybe not healthy, but they will be a very, I think it is welcome addition to an astronaut’s menu,” says Jud Ready, from the Georgia Tech Research Institute.
“We’re going to travel many, many months. You know, six months, 12 months, 18 months to go to Mars. It’s going to get tiring eating things from squeezy tubes.” Ready adds.
Nanoracks and Zero G Kitchen, a New York City startup that collaborated on the project, are considering more experiments for the orbiting oven and possibly more space appliances.
What are in orbit now are essentially food warmers.
Additional testing is required to determine whether the three returned cookies are safe to eat.
And how do they taste? No one knows.
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