Welcome to the Battle of the Food Scientist. Battle of the Food Scientist is an annual competition put on by the Department of Food Science and Technology at UNL. Teams of two to four students compete to create the best food products within specific parameters. This year's theme is baking. In Round 1, each team is required to make a high protein gluten-free cookie in 45 minutes. So we're definitely going to look for making sure they hit their protein content, making sure it's all gluten-free. There's no contamination from any wheat products because we do have ingredients that have wheat in them. So if they accidentally use that, we definitely want to put that. Then obviously looking for a piece of the appearance, making sure that they're taste good. And then the last is observing their good manufacturing practices while they were cooking, so making sure that they were using gloves. Here are the Nets, Beer Nets, Keeping their station clean, not cross-consuminating tools and not all that good. So I'm David Gomez. I was on team number two. So we were cave in Guiavano, Armando Lerma and Carmen Perez. And we were all Latinos. Armando was from Mexico and the other two are from Colombia. And I'm from Colombia myself. So at first it was really confusing because we were given to different recipes, one for a normal cookie and one for the gluten-free, high protein cookie. So we weren't sure which cookie we had to make, so we had to ask which one we were like, now you have to make the second one. The first one was just to like to kind of walk through you the recipe and stuff and it would be okay. My name's Madeline Jasky. So the other two people in my team were Olivia Kinney, who is also a senior food science major and then Caitlin, who is also a senior food science major. We kind of made a name with the KitchenAid Mixers. I don't know if you've seen the little dates, the Snicker and Date Frozen treats that were all over like Instagram and TikTok, like maybe a year ago. That was kind of our path there. So we took dates, peanut butter powder, chocolate chips, and yeah, just kind of the normal recipe. And tried to make that. Also, Caitlin, who was in our group, is gluten-free and also can't have peanut butter, so it was kind of, she knew a lot more about like the gluten-free flowers and stuff, which was helpful. My name is Profashi Shibos. I'm a graduate student in food science and technology. I started in 2021 as a grad student in food science. Our team was team one and we named it Ambrosia. And Ambrosia technically means food for God as per Roman literature. Our team comprised of two other lab members of my lab, Wani Shainthini. She is also a PhD student, just joined this spring. And there was another girl called Seroton. She also joined PhD this spring. And comprised of another member from another lab postdoc, Urvinder. It was like just 30 minutes, so like a lot of things to do. So we needed to change the standard recipe. And having like 20% around 20% protein in the cookie was a challenge. So we were running through making the calculations. I'm Adam Lears. I'm a sophomore here at Lincoln Nebraska in the food science department. Me and Janine were on a team together. We were the two sophomores there, so we called ourselves the Wise Fools, which is what sophomore literally translates to. And so we were really excited to come to a bake-off. The first thing that we did is we looked at the cookies, and we were like, what can we do to make this? So we did the math out to get as close to 7 to 10 grams as possible, and still come out with a good cookie. And then after that, we decided to use almond flour, because it was gluten-free, but still had a high protein content. And then we went directly to peanut butter, and used some powder peanut butter to ensure that we were able to hit the high protein content. And then we added some way isolate to get all the way up there. And then to spice the cookie up a little bit, we added some peanut butter chocolate chips to it, and then some cinnamon on top to give it some extra flavor. All teams did not have enough time to fully bake their cookies, which resulted in a five-minute extension. Even with the extra five minutes, teams struggled to get their cookies fully baked for the judges. We spent too much time during the calculations to know which flour to use, and that the final cookie had the proper amount of protein. So because of that, and we wasted a lot of time, our cookies didn't cook through, so they were raw and not edible. So that was kind of sad. When we baked the cookie, it had a lot of peanut butter, so it kind of ran through, and the texture wasn't really as what we expected, but it wasn't that bad in taste, like it was tasty. So that's how round one ended, kind of messed up situation. Kind of after everyone took their cookies out, especially the group in front of us, that was just like a giant sheet pan. I was like, oh, okay. I was kind of like, maybe we have some, but overall, I don't think that round weren't great for any of the groups. So yeah. In round two, the contestants had 50 minutes again to create any baked good they pleased. The only catch was they had to use the secret ingredients, cricket powder, and Swiss mists, cinnamon, hot cocoa mix. The cricket powder, although odd and weird, it could easily be incorporated into things. Like I just kind of thought of it as like a flower or some kind of like dry material that was kind of already in the recipe. So I was too freaked out by it, and like Swiss mists, like I don't know, like that's just like fancy cocoa powder in my brain. Yeah, going to this second round, I think that we had a good plan of where we wanted to go. Even before the competition, we were planning on doing a deconstructed pie if we were able to, because we think that'd be nice and to spice things up a little bit. So we had a good idea where we wanted the ingredients to go. Having the cricket powder was kind of a challenge because it has a particular distinct smell, which can disrupt the total taste of the food. So we were kind of afraid what would happen with the cricket powder. So we decided to make kajal kahawwah. We had pre-decided that. And then it's renamed it as the great Indian carrot porridge. It is dish made of carrot, cooked in milk, and it's sweet in taste. So we thought that it would really go well as a sweet dish in a baked product. It would be unique. During the meantime, between the first and the second challenge, we looked through recipes on the internet and we found our brownie recipe. So we decided that we can make our brownie and just replace some of the flour with the cricket powder and use some of the cinnamon to give it more flavor and to mask the flavor and the cricket powder on the brownie. So me and Jeanine split it up and so she went to make the crust of the pie, which we turned into a crumble. And I immediately went to make the actual inside the filling. So it's just water when you add some cornstarch, some sugar, and then the actual cherries to it. And then mostly it's just mixing around getting to a place where you have a good both texture and taste and then adding in the Swiss-Misc Simintose Crunch, which was one of the mystery ingredients. So we ended up making wippy pies. We had, I believe it was like Samores cookie mix and we just kind of took out the Samore part and added in the cricket part. And so we did the Swiss-Misc like in there, baked the cookie, then kind of while the cookies were in the oven, we assembled the frosting, which we then added some crazons too, that we then like we hydrated and blended up and it was actually pretty good. Yeah, we did end up kind of forgetting that cookies were hot when they came out of the oven. And so it was hard, kind of at that stage, right, the end to just make sure that the frosting wasn't just falling like out of the cookie. While the judges tasted their products, each group had to come up with a pitch for their baked goods as well. And we felt, I wouldn't say confident, but at least we finished the product, we followed the guidelines and it just had to taste and see what the others had to present. We thought we did like a pretty good pitch, so overall I think we were really proud of what we did accomplish and what better than the first round. I think we all thought, so yeah, I really, I really was happy with what we did. For this year's Battle of the Food Scientist, getting a $10 mil gift card is Team Two. Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo! I think none of us were expecting to win anything, so when we got announced as the runner-ups, we were very surprised, but we were really, really happy. Team! Woo! Woo! Woo! Our team worked really well. One thing and the other thing was that it was a great thing to plan beforehand for the second round. So we just decided in the morning, thanks to our advisor, we had a quick talk that and he was like, you need to make something unique to stand out. And then we suddenly decided, okay, let's make something traditional Indian food. And it would help us stand out. So planning ahead was definitely a bonus point. And then all the team members working together, it was a good thing, spirit and teamwork. That helped us make this win. Thank you.