Bethany likes to read fantasy books. She plays the cello in orchestra and builds little things like rubber band–powered cars for amusement. She hopes for a career in engineering or teaching because she says, "I have been told that I am patient and persistent."
As a person with celiac disease, Bethany knows all too well how difficult it is to find tasty food while on a gluten-free diet. Such foods must not contain wheat, rye, or barley, so she devised an experiment in which breads were made without these ingredients, using closely controlled mixtures. She hypothesized that by using micro- and macro-nutrient data—and optimizing bread height and texture—she could produce gluten-free bread with better-than-average nutrition that would pass a taste test.
Bethany designed a spreadsheet to calculate the nutrient content of various gluten-free flour blends based on the nutritional data of their component parts. She created eight blended formulas of these flours, each of which had a nutritional content equal to or greater than a 50-50 mixture of whole wheat and all-purpose flour. She baked them in a trial run with various amounts of liquid, gauging texture and height of each loaf. She chose the four blends with the most complete protein content for further testing. Bethany baked 60 loaves, using bread made from brown rice flour as a control. Breads baked using the four gluten-free formulas were rated as "fair" or better by 88 percent of 74 people who tested them in a blinded taste test. Nine other people who had experience with a gluten-free diet rated the breads "fair" or better.
