In your cereal, in your coffee, in your glass.

Calcium!

But the best use for milk: dunking cookies.

I mean, who doesn't love a cookie dipped in milk?

But why?

Turns out it's because science says so.

But before we get into it, let's take a quick look back in time.

It's 10,000 BCE.

The agricultural revolution occurs,

animals are domesticated and animals are milked. Great!

A lot of time goes by.

Hey, guess what? It's 1862.

Louis Pasteur modernizes milk safety.

The term pasteurize is born.

Get it?

Maybe no?

Who cares!

Moving on. It's 1884!

Milk is bottled up.

The milkman became a thing, yada, yada, yada.

1994, "Got Milk?" ads swept the nation.

Everyone's got a milk mustache, great!

Now that's over.

Why the h-e-double hockey sticks do we dunk our cookies into milk?

When you dip cookies into milk, you change a number of things about those cookies that completely alters your eating experience.

By alters, Matt means, oh wait, let me introduce you to Matt.

Hi, my name is Matt Hartings, and I am a Professor of Chemistry.

And I teach a class on cooking chemistry here at American University.

But back to it.

By alters, Matt means when you dip cookies into milk, not only does the texture and flavor change, but the chemical composition does as well,

which is what makes scientists go wild.

Chemists are fascinated in how taste works, and how all of the molecules that you're experiencing when you're eating food,

how they all work together, and lead to one thought in your brain.

But how?

There are specific ways to measure food chemistry,

things like an MS-Nose that tries to break down food aromas into their individual parts.

The MS-Nose is a tool that helps scientists understand how complex molecules come together to make flavor.

So what does all this fancy technology tell us when you dunk that cookie?

You add a creaminess to your cookie, and that makes your cookie taste completely different.

We will dampen some of the flavors that are naturally sharp in a chocolate chip cookie.

It will soak up liquids,

so we can universally agree, dunking chocolate chip cookies into milk is the best thing ever?

Speaking to my own experience, I am not a big dipper.

Wait, what?

I take a bite of my cookie and then have a drink of milk.

You just had to be different, didn't you?!

Still sounds delicious to me.