Splitting Oreos Evenly Is Impossible, Says Study We Will Absolutely Replicate at Home

Unless you’re a heathen who bites directly into Oreo cookies when you eat them, you’re probably like the rest of us – on an endless quest to twist Oreos open and find each side equally coated with that irresistible, addictive crème. Alas, have you ever succeeded? Do you even know someone who has? Or is opening an Oreo evenly an urban myth?

Well, one MIT researcher wanted to find out, so she launched a study to formally examine why the hell Oreos don’t split the way we want them to. Her name is Crystal Owens, and she’s a Ph.D. candidate who studies mechanical engineering. She created an “Oreometer” with her 3-D printer, which was based on a twisting machine called a rheometer. Then she put the iconic chocolate cookies with the vanilla crème center in the machine to see what happened. (Finally, a scientific study we can get behind!)

Photo: Crystal Owens

“If you think about it, if you twist it perfectly, you should be able to get the cream to split exactly in the middle, right?” Owens told Today. “And so I just wanted to see if there if it’s possible to do that if there’s any sort of trick or twisting that can make that happen. And so then we could use our laboratory rheometer to apply all sorts of complex, precisely programmed twisting motions to see what was possible.”

Spoiler alert: she was not successful in hacking a 50-50 Oreo cookie split. In fact, 95 percent of the cookies she put in the Oreometer ended up split with the crème entirely on one cookie with the second cookie left bare. (This condition was officially dubbed an “adhesive failure.”)

Photo: Crystal Owens

“I was actually very frustrated by that,” said Owens. “In my opinion, the Oreo cookie tastes best if you can have a little bit of creme and a little bit of wafer on each side.”

Photo: Crystal Owens

Oh, well. At least she tried. As for us, we’re going to stock up on Oreos right now so we can continue replicating this study at home. Even if that perfect split proves elusive, we’ll have a delicious time failing.

Cover Photo: Lumpang Moonmuang / EyeEm (Getty Images)