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NIST in Your Cooking |
From the temperature of your oven to the measurement of your baking ingredients, NIST provides unseen culinary assistance.
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The dough is ready. You pop the dollop-laden cookie sheet into the oven and set the timer for 10 minutes. A quick check of the temperature setting--175 degrees Celsius (about 350 degrees Fahrenheit)--and you know those delicious cookies are on their way. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) quite likely has helped you make that batch of cookies. For one thing, NIST's Weights & Measures Division provides the standards by which your measuring spoons and cups ultimately were calibrated by their manufacturers. The same NIST office develops the technical protocols by which state and local officials make sure that there is as much product inside of a package as is indicated on the outside of the package. NIST is even inside your oven when those cookies are baking. A multidisciplinary team of engineers, physicists and mathematicians at the National Institute of Standards and Technology is responsible for a data-filled technical manual, known as Monograph 175, by which the makers of the kind of thermometer inside your stove can calibrate their thermometers, or thermocouples, so they read temperatures accurately. In essence, Monograph 175 is to the millions of thermocouples in stoves, auto engines and thousands of other places what the graduated lines are to an archetypal mercury-filled thermometer. |