There was one time when I put a mold filled with liquid water in a cold container and made solid water.

I take in oxygen and turn it into philosophical thought.

Extracted lsa from morning glory seeds in order to make my own knock-off lsd

I helped create life and It was orgasmic!

baking bread

Weed science. Not complicated at all, but there’s so much bro science out there…

Eating.

Probably something using dihydrogen monoxide as a solvent for a mixture of organic compounds

Closest I’ve come to Mad Scientist was probably yeast ranching to control costs in homebrewing.

• sterilize agar media and plates/tubes in poor man’s autoclave (pressure coooker) and hood (open oven door and vent fan) - infection rates were surprisingly low with this low-tech approach. I lost maybe 5% of cultures to spurious growth.
• streak yeast from $$$ pure liquid cultures, grow, store if successful.
• also experimented with yeast suspensions in sterile distilled water based on a 1930s science journal article from a dude in Africa. The suspensions did better in the heat where agar would just remelt…
• a few days before needed scrape the streak into a small amount of sterile wort (20ml? on a homemade stirplate (PC fan and HD magnets under an unpended tupperware bowl!), stepping up to pitchable volume coinciding with the batch cooling to pitch temperature…

It was a lot of fun and instead of one 5gal batch of beer from an exotic $20 yeast sample you could get as many as you wanted. In practice I usually did 5-10 cultures from each pure sample. Could do more than that but there was a limit to how much stuff I could sterilize in my “autoclave” at one time.

Edited to add: I successfully cultured yeast from hefeweizen, but since what’s in the bottle is typically for secondary/priming rather than primary it was only for fun. I had 100% failure trying to harvest wild yeast from the air or sampled from fruit skins. I couldn’t isolate the yeast from other critters.

For me it has been etching circuit boards and specifically making my own liquid tinning solution at one point. I mostly do hydrochloric acid/hydrogen peroxide on larger stuff and ferric chloride on smaller prototypes.

I bake from scratch.

I’m surprised that nobody has done an extraction of organic/aromatic content in an oil/fat ? Have you never backed some “space cakes” ? I haven’t but I’ve seen people doing it, and it’s pretty advanced chemistry when you think well

Steel etching with Winsteard’s reagent. It is a bit dangerous because if done wrong it forms explosive dust. It was also long and tedious because the liquid must be near boiling and stirring so it evaporated quickly and has to be topped off and brought back to temperature often. The etch itself requires a long temper of a quenched sample and has an iterative process of etching and back-polishing to gradually remove surface roughness but leave the slightly deeper grain boundaries.

It took several hours of preparation and several hours of active work per sample and even then had a 50/50 success rate. I was professionally trained by a third party who learned this process from the person who perfected it, George Vander Voort.

I don’t know if we can call it chemistry but quenching steel.

In high school I was doing blacksmithing and so quenching the blade was part of the process, probably my favorite part.

Heating the blade above 800°C and dipping it in oil, with the oil instantly catching fire was always very dramatic.

I got old