Cooking on the moon offers some interesting challenges. It isn't as simple as Space Family Robinson setting up a picnic table, firing up the barbeque pit, and throwing on some hamburgers. First, if they were planning an outdoor supper, the entire Robinson family would be in space suits. Hard to imagine how they would eat a hamburger through the face shield. OK, so maybe they cook outside then go into their space ship to eat?
Well, probably not. For one thing, they definitely wouldn't be lighting up the charcoal -- no air, no fire, but how about cooking on an electric grill? That might work to get things hot -- but whatever they were trying to cook would be really really dry. Why? Because there is no air, and therefore no air pressure. As the ambient pressure goes down, the boiling point of water goes down. Zero atmospheric pressure equals immediate water boiling! Water, or moisture in hamburger meat, would rapidly boil away into space on the sunlit side of the Moon, which is very very hot from direct solar exposure, or form very fine ice crystals in the shadow side, which is hundreds of degrees below zero. When they tried to heat the meat to cook it, the water would evaporate.
With that sort of harsh environment, the Family Robinson decides to cook and eat on their pressurized, temperature controlled spaceship, and since the cook-hamburgers-on-the-grill idea has been nixed, Mrs. Robinson decides to make steak and biscuits. She brought along her precious Earth cookbook and her digital kitchen scale with its super accurate load cell technology. Her cookbook tells her that to make a dozen biscuits, she needs 10 oz. of flour. She sets up her scale and scooping flour into the scale's bowl. She keeps adding flour, thinking that this is a lot more flour than she remembers using back on Earth. When the scale reads 10 oz, the bowl is nearly full, and she remembers that on the moon, things weigh about 1/6 of what they weigh on Earth, so she pours the flour back into the flour container (very gently because since it's so light, it is really easy to end up with flour dust all over the kitchen!). She realizes that she could simply measure the volume of ingredients but she has no measuring cups, so she divides the required weight of flour by 6. This time when she puts flour into the scale bowl, she is looking for 10/6 or one and two-thirds oz. When the scale reads one and two-thirds ounce, it looks like she has about the right amount of flour.
Next, Mrs. Robinson questions how hot the oven needs to be to cook on the moon. She knows that when cooking at high altitudes water boils at a lower temperature so things like rice take a lot longer to cook (unless you have a pressure cooker). However, changes in altitude do not affect oven temperatures, but baking items often rise quicker at higher altitudes, so it is necessary to increase the oven temperature. Fortunately, she is cooking in a pressurized space ship, so that will not be necessary for this batch of biscuits. After supper Mrs. Robinson sits down at her computer to browse the internet for a kitchen scale that offers special conversions based on what planet they find themselves.
