Fractals in the Kitchen

Cauliflower is a wonderful example of a natural fractal. A small piece of a cauliflower looks like a whole cauliflower.

Pieces of the pieces look like the whole cauliflower, and so on for several more subdivisions.

Here is a picture of a cauliflower and a piece broken from it.

Or is it? Click the picture for another view.

As crepes cook, the boiling milk forms bubbles of many different sizes, giving rise to a fractal distribution of rings.

Some big rings, more middle-size rings, still more smaller rings, and so on.

Here are some pictures. Click each to magnify in a new window.

Some breads are natural fractals. Bread dough rises because yeast produces bubbles of carbon dioxide.

Many bubbles are small, some a middle-size, a few are large, typical of the distribution of gaps in a fractal.

So bread dough is a foam; bread is that foam baked solid.

Click each picture to magnify in a new window. On the right the bread has been painted to emphasize the holes.

Kneading the dough too much breaks up the larger bubbles and gives bread of much more uniform (non-fractal) texture.