Project Summary
My driving question was: is it possible to closely recreate restaurant food at home and have it be just as good? I became interested in this topic because I have a food blog, which sparked my interest in food photography and going to different restaurants. I am also really interested in cooking in baking, so I wanted to combine these interests. I did this by going to restaurants and then trying to recreate the food. I have experience in this area because I frequently go to restaurants, take pictures of food, and cook food. During the process of completing my project, I discovered an interest in creating my own recipes because I found myself experimenting with basic recipes and adding ingredients to them to make them taste more like the restaurant dish. While going to restaurants, I learned the atmosphere is a large part of the experience of eating food. This was shown because at home, it didn’t really feel special at all when I was eating the food even though it was the same dish that felt nicer and overall more enjoyable to eat when I was at the restaurants. The end result of my project is a website that describes the process of my project, all of the restaurants I went to, and pictures of the dishes I got and recreated. My goals changed because originally I wanted to make a book to show the results of my project, but I decided to do a website because in DTC we experimented with making Google Sites for our March Madness projects and I really liked mine, so I kept updating it with my progress. A challenge that I faced was that for a certain period of time, restaurants didn’t have indoor dining and it was cold out, so I didn’t really want to eat outside. This pushed back my project because I had to wait until it was warmer to go to the restaurants. It was surprising that some of the recipes were published online by the restaurants, so I didn’t have to experiment with recipes and come up with a recipe on my own, so that was really nice. Overall, my project was really fun to complete and while there were a few difficulties, ultimately I successfully answered my driving question.
