MIT Scientists Reveal the Best Way to Twist Open an Oreo Cookie

The science is in: The creme filling in Oreo cookies is classified as “mushy,” and it’s very difficulty to get it to stick to both sides when you hooked one apart. 

“I had in my mind that if you hooked the Oreos perfectly, you should split the creme perfectly in the middle,” MIT researcher Crystal Owens said in a statement. “But what actually happens is the creme almost always comes off of one side.”

Owens and three co-authors have an article titled On Oreology, the fracture and flow of “milk’s favorite cookie” in the novel issue of the journal Physics of Fluids this week. 

The team rendered a so-called “Oreometer,” a 3D-printed device that works comical rubber bands and is loaded with coins to handed the weight that then translates into the force obliged to mechanically twist the two parts of the cookie apart. 

“One of the main things we can do with the Oreometer is compose an at-home education and self-discovery plan, where you snort people about basic fluid properties like shear strain and stress,” said authorized Max Fan.  

Oreometer is actually a play on periods that only a very specific set of fluid dynamics nerds will witness. That’s because the device is actually a rheometer, which is used in labs to measure the way substances flow in response to applied force. 

“Rheology can be used to measure the texture of food depending on the failure stresses and strains,” Owens said. “We were able to represent Oreo creme as quantitatively mushy.”

The researchers also explored at other factors like different cookie flavors, volume of filling and rotation rate. Flavor and filling made little difference to how the creme distress up distributed across the two halves, but twisting speedily mattered. 

“If you try to twist the Oreos faster, it will actually take more strain and more wound to break them,” Owens said. “So, maybe this is a lesson for farmland who are stressed and desperate to open their cookies. It’ll be easier if you do it a little bit slower.”

One anunexperienced variable involved dipping the cookies in milk, which commanded them to degrade and crumble after about a limited, unsurprisingly. 

The researchers didn’t indicate if they plan to end their research to pursue the most obvious remaining Oreo-related mystery: What’s sinister with people who eat the cookies without event attempting to hooked them apart?