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This Is How Long You Should Dunk Your Oreo In Milk For

This Is How Long You Should Dunk Your Oreo In Milk For

Very ~important~ science news update: a team of researchers have discovered the exact amount of time you should dunk an Oreo in milk for.

Researchers at Utah State University's splash lab spent several hours a day for two weeks testing the ideal dunking time after they got the idea while eating cookies and milk.

"We've always had, like, these crazy ideas, I guess you'd say," Dr. Tadd Truscott told KSL.com. "We were always saying, 'We should be always curious, asking as many questions as we can.'"

"That question kept coming up, like, 'What is the best dunking time?' And everybody kind of argued about it," he explained.

That question kept coming up, like, 'What is the best dunking time?' And everybody kind of argued about it.

Truscott and his colleagues used various cookies for their dunking experiment, including graham crackers, Nutter Butters, and, of course, Oreos, with the goal of trying to understand how cookies absorb liquids and how long it takes for them to get to full capacity.

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"Basically, every cookie, it draws in milk at roughly the same rate," Truscott said. However, researchers noted a slight variation among the cookies — thin graham crackers, for example, can only last a second in milk.

They also found that Oreos absorb 50 per cent of fluids after just one second. The optimum amount of time you should dunk your Oreo in milk for? Four seconds. This amount of time is when the cookie reaches maximum absorption. If you go just one or two seconds over, you'll have a soggy cookie. Gross.

"What's happened is the sugars are starting to break down as well as proteins and the more complicated structure within," Truscott said.

The results from this research run a bit counter to a taste test HuffPost editors did in 2014, where they tried to determine the perfect amount of time to dunk an Oreo into milk depending on how moist you like your cookie.

In their experiment, editors dunked an Oreo into 2 per cent milk at a series of intervals: two and a half seconds, five seconds, 10 seconds, 15 seconds, 20 seconds, 25 seconds, 35 seconds, 45 seconds and 60 seconds.

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They concluded that if you like your Oreo slightly soft, a few seconds is ideal, however if you like your cookie on the brink of falling apart, you can keep that cookie in there for close to a minute.

"At 2.5 seconds the cookie was slightly moist but completely retained its structure. At five seconds, the cookie was significantly softer. At 10 seconds, it was so soft that we were worried it might collapse soon. Little did we know, we had a full 50 seconds until the cookie crumbled," the taste testers reported.

So next time you rip open that box of Oreos, how long will you dunk your cookie in milk for?

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