This reminds me of how the Continental Congress ended up appointing a Baker General to serve with Washington during the Revolutionary War.<p><i>After the barrels had been transported by wagon out into the field and their contents distributed, soldiers devoid of ovens to make bread pooled their rations and made arrangements for those qualified bakers within their ranks to take the next step. They then went into the local community and used whatever cooking facilities were available, returning later to distribute one pound of bread for every pound of flour a soldier contributed. What they did not tell them was that for every 100 pounds of flour, some 130 one-pound loaves of bread could be produced simply because water was added. This allowed bakers to make a handsome thirty percent profit when they sold the extra loaves in the open market. For those soldiers deciding to keep their flour ration, they either transformed it into a very rough “fire cake” cooked in the coals of a nearby fire or traded it with the local country folk; many instances of straggling and plundering then ensued. There was clearly much room for improvement.</i><p><a href="https://allthingsliberty.com/2015/05/george-washingtons-baker-master/" rel="nofollow">https://allthingsliberty.com/2015/05/george-washingtons-bake...</a>
I worked in a company making warehouse management systems. After deployment on production for a new customer storing cheeses we found a lot of bugs (the system would say there should be 10 kg of some cheese at particular location but there was only 9.7 kg etc.)<p>Eventually we realized cheese is losing weight with time and we had to include that into all of our algorithms :)
My guess before reading is the resulting chow has more air in it.<p>Edit after reading: I think I am on the money. I don't think it is a completely sphere-packing phenomenon. Quinoa is fluffy when cooked, not soggy and laiden with completely with water. Packing might contribute but I am betting it's mostly air inside the Quinoa making that extra volume.
Volume isn't conserved; only mass is conserved in physics, so your final pot can't have greater mass than what you put in it; it can only have less, considering steam is given off. But volume? All bets are off.<p>Even if it weren't a packing problem it's not obvious to me that a X mL single quinoa grain that absorbs Y mL water can occupy only X+Y mL. It could be much larger depending on the structure the resulting thing has.<p>Separately, I've always had to put more water in than the quinoa boxes say.
I always liked this problem...<p>What packs more efficiently in a barrel; tennis balls, marbles, or a mixture of tennis balls and marbles?<p>It feels like the smaller marbles are denser but obviously they actually pack the same efficiency as the tennis balls or any other sphere, the mixture packs more efficiently.
It's an interesting observation. Can you add some close up photos of the quinoa grains before and after cooking? (With something that does not change of size, for scale.)
This seems reasonable if the final product also contains something else, like air, or the water is less efficiently packed inside the quinoa. It's easy to pack water less efficiently then it will normally be as a liquid. Freezing it into ice causes it to expand and have a lower density as well.
When cooking rice a good rule of thumb is to use equal parts water and rice because a given volume of rice is able to absorb the same volume of water. I imagine the rice or quinoa is expanding as it cooks and absorbs water.
gently triggered by someone having a PhD in stat mech and not having to do the grueling proofs of this sort of stuff that at least I did in materials science.
This is also a great of example of how really smart people with deep knowledge in one domain can totally fail real-world skills.<p>Anyone who cooks a lot has a gut feel for how different foods increase in volume when baked (breads, like popovers), fried (crispy rice noodles), fluffed (rice) or sifted (macrons!), even if they don't understand packing volumes or programming...<p>Experience actually does matter.