Bringing food chemistry to life






         A blog about food and its components – feel free to comment

February 2, 2010

Starch links

Filed under: food chemistry, starch — rossand @ 9:16 am

It’s starch week in our winter food chemistry class

http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/hysta.html martin Chaplin at London Southbank Univ.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-BxG4UfAu8&NR=1 Alton Brown – who neglects amylopectin

http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/play-doh2.htm it is ‘entertainment’ after all…

http://www.foodinnovation.com/FoodInnovation/en-US/ National Starch – no endorsement expressed or implied – just good example of commercial literature

http://pslc.ws/macrog/starch.htm Starch in the Macrogalleria

All things starch http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/5007532/home -  Starch – Stärke

http://www.fao.org/Ag/magazine/pdf/starches.pdf a summary of common starches and applications from FAO


January 25, 2010

Outstanding !!!

Filed under: Baking, Instruction, food chemistry — rossand @ 4:44 pm

Posted Jan 4 2010 by kscereallab on youtube. This is just one of a group of videos showing the gelatinization of the starch granules of a number of plant species. From the channel name I am guessing with some certainty that this is the cereal lab at Kansas State U, my wife’s alma mater.

I have been looking for ways for the whole class to see this (starch gelatinization) at one time. And because I don’t have the technology available to film what I am seeing in a microscope, this is really a great help. It appears as though the filming was done using a microscope fitted with a hot stage. Thanks KSU !

I guess I would have been exceptionally pleased if they had been able to somehow log the temperature rise as they filmed the granule behaviour.

Looks like a great application for mobile-phone-based microscopy as reported here in July last year.

Wheat starch

See more at http://www.youtube.com/user/kscereallab


January 18, 2010

This is great !

Filed under: Instruction, food chemistry — rossand @ 10:06 am

Digital Learning Material for Food Chemistry Education

The website gives a taste of what these folks at Wageningen have been doing in creating a virtual learning space for food chemistry teaching.

Their website gives an overview of the digital learning material that they have designed and developed. The work was done by the Laboratory of Food Chemistry of Wageningen University and is targeted at bachelors and masters students.

There are only a couple of working examples, most else are screen shots of other exercises.

If you click on the “activating exercises” tab on the left menu you can experience the material on proteins and phenolic compounds. I can just see a great opportunity for learning some of the basis material, leaving class and lab time open for better things, like product development exercises and hands-on experience of some aspects of food chemistry that in my view need to be seen and handled for a true understanding [non-Newtonian flow behaviors for example].

It  seems the group Julia Diederen; Harry Gruppen; Alphons Voragen; Rob Hartog; Martin Mulder; and Harm Biemans, have been working on this since at least 2002. You can see some other details here  Design Guidelines for Digital Learning Material for Food Chemistry Education and see some of the progression from 2002 through 2006 at least.

I just love the idea and much of its application, I can’t wait to get a chance to test drive the decision tree for functional ingredients.

They have  bibliography of their formal publications in the area as well, also accessed via the left menu.

There is a movie version of the pre-lab and a lab assignment which is illustrative.


January 2, 2010

Clim8beer

Filed under: barley, food chemistry — rossand @ 11:52 am

Harboes Brewery in Denmark has released a ‘fresh tasting lager” that does not use malt !

They say…

“Harboe introducerer den revolutionerende Clim8Beer – en moderne brygget pilsner, som sparer miljøet for mere end 8% CO2 pr. øl men med samme gode smag”.

“Clim8Beer is nothing less than a revolution, a fresh lager brewed in a modern way, saving the environment for more than 8g CO2 per unit. Still, with the same great taste of course”.

Instead of malt Harboes are using an enzyme preparation (Ondea® Pro) from Novozymes to replace the malt. I am guessing alpha- and beta-amylases (to get the maltose from the starch), maybe amylogucosidase and/or pullulanase (to make sure there is a maximum of fermentable sugar and not too many small maltodextrins with alpha 1-6 bonds), maybe some proteases to mimic the mild proteolysis that should be active in barley malt so that the proteins/peptides after mashing are at the appropriate stage of hydrolysis, and of course some betaglucanase for the mixed linkage beta -glucans that are the cause of stuck mashes.

Harboes has called the beer clim8, www.clim8beer.dk, as they claim a reduction in the carbon footprint from the sidestepping of malting. I guess malting does use quite a bit of energy and water. A lot of the energy must be used in the kilning of the malt.

There are english language videos like this one http://www.clim8beer.dk/english/tilblivelsen_af_clim8.html that describe the process.

Novozymes take on the new beer is here http://www.novozymes.com/en/MainStructure/PressAndPublications/PressRelease/2009/BarleyBeer.htm.

Novozymes claim that it is a “sustainable revolution in brewing” , but of course it still needs to taste good !!! I am interested to taste my first sample.

Is this a good or bad thing – is it the end of the malthouse (I personally doubt it, especially for darker beers that rely on more extensively kilned malt). Just how do they replace the flavors created by kilning? Even in a mild beer using a pale malt there must be some products of Maillard that lead to the toasty, nutty, roasted flavors.


December 31, 2009

Yet another classic from Khymos…

Filed under: Uncategorized — rossand @ 12:47 pm

Get your amphetamines from gingerbread “in furno”

If the coffee has to be caffeine free, maybe getting your jollies from ammonium carbonate leavened gingerbread will dull the cravings.

Martin Lersch goes through the basic chemistry at his blog. As he points out the fullt text of the more recent paper can be retrieved at this link   Idle J.R. 2005

Christmas Gingerbread (Lebkuchen) and Christmas Cheer – Review of the Potential Role of Mood Elevating Amphetamine-like Compounds Formed in vivo and in furno” by the unfortunately named J.R. Idle

Food chemistry at its finest.

HAPPY NEW YEAR !!!

available under a Creative Commons license via petar_cs Flickr photostream

available under a Creative Commons license via petar_c's Flickr photostream


Real natural Decaf

Filed under: Coffee — rossand @ 12:34 pm

A species of coffee from Cameroon is caffeine free.

Read about it here http://species.asu.edu/2009_species09 where it was named one of the top 10 new species of 2009 (named in 2008) by the

International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University.

Coffee and Conservation report that the plant was was “first collected in 1983, but remained unstudied and not described to science until 2008” in their post.

Stoffelen, P., M. Noirot, E. Couturon & F. Anthony. 2008. A new caffeine-free coffee from Cameroon. Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society 158: 67-72.

OSU campus-based folks can see the full text of the paper via this link http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/121394905/abstract

ABSTRACT

“A new Coffea species from Cameroon is described and compared with the other species of Central Africa. Coffea charrieriana Stoff. & F. Anthony can be recognized easily using morphological characters of leaves, flowers and fruits. Moreover, it is the first record of a caffeine-free Coffea species for Central Africa and only the second report for the African continent. Cameroon is one of the three centres of diversity for the genus Coffea, showing a similar number of species to that of Tanzania. © 2008 The Linnean Society of London, Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, 2008, 158, 67–72″.

It seems that caffeine free coffee species are rare. I don’t know how long it takes to breed new coffee varieties, but i am sure someone is working on getting the caffeine-free trait into a cultivatable form. Stay tuned.

As a dedicated caffeine devotee I vote that the new variety should be called “What’s the point?” in honor of the no-fat decaf latte.

c05


December 18, 2009

The search for perfect texture

Filed under: Uncategorized — rossand @ 1:22 pm

Links to the Texture Technologies student video contest entries for 2009.

These can be found at Texture Technologies’ Youtube channel “The Texture Channel

The videos are from a number of colleges, Kansas State U, Brigham Young U, U of Arkansas, Indiana U, West Virginia U, and South Dakota State U, as well as us here at OregonState

Lots of thought went into these and we know at least that ours was fun to make.


Lab cats love laminar flow

Filed under: Uncategorized — rossand @ 12:51 pm

From a “Lab Cat” post from May 2008.  Lab Cat was kind enough to link to this blog.

This is a visually compelling look at laminar flow. This was filmed at the University of New Mexico Physics Department.

You need to listen to the video to get what they are doing.

Lab Cat has some very interesting and credible food chemistry related posts if you track back through her posts via the tags; “chemistry“, “food“, and “science“.

Lab Cat seems very interested in Non-enzymatic browning – arguably the most important set of reactions in food science.


December 1, 2009

late breaking news… new things to do with retrograded starch

Filed under: Uncategorized — rossand @ 2:15 pm

Link sent by Daniel DiMuzio author of “Bread baking: An artisan’s perspective

Bread shoes.

I guess they are not much use here in western Oregon during the rainy seaon.

A good laugh, and multiple styles..

http://www.dadadastudio.eu/shop/?c=5

4085395523_80dc1e366d_o

Image used under a creative common license from the Flickr page of “Endless Studio

Trivia and ephemera – bubbles and rheology exposed

Filed under: food chemistry — rossand @ 12:51 pm

A great new gallery

Brought to my attention by a former student – many thanks P.

A special item from New Scientist all about imag[in]ing fluid dynamics. The images come from physicists at the American Physical Society’s [link] Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota. New Scientist though that these were their best experimental images in their “gallery of fluid motion“. You can see more here [red dye splash in milk] and here.

What’s  “foody“  about this?

Well it’s all the chemistry of surfaces and polymers in solution etc that guide the behaviors of foods when they are deformed by a force or forces during mixing, or emulsification/homogenization, or carbonation, or foaming, or chewing, or during fermentation in breadmaking etc.

In the New Scientist gallery these images were most “food chemistry” for me.

Image 2 – the “anti-bubbles” – these must be present in liquid food systems with mixtures of entrained air and surfactants under vigorous mixing.

Image 3 – injecting ketchup into gelatin. Not sure why you would do this to food, except as a physics experiment, but the choice of a polymeric gel and an odd material [ketchup] that has a high concentration of particulates and exhibits a yield stress is interesting. It makes me wonder what the shape might have been had they injected,  say a 2% w/v xanthan solution using a high molecular weight xanthan? Maybe this is a way of creating new and intriguing compoite textures.

Image 4 – Weird behavior at immiscible interfaces. maybe this is what the micro-structure of an un-emulsified vinaigrette looks like before it’s shaken up and just after we hit it with the laser stun gun.

Image 5 – splashing behavior of viscous fluids – is their a new idea in creating new shapes/textures/products by “splashing” at low atmospheric pressures where the fluid just spreads – maybe a neat way of creating smooth amorphous glassy solids*  from polymer solutions or melts by quenching on a cold surfaces at low pressure.

* as opposed to structured crystalline solids

Image 7 – This is just cool, maybe what a drop of really thick gelatine solution looks like dropping into hot water where it is soluble.

Image 9 – bubble behavior – just very interesting and salient to all the bubbles we create in all sorts of foods and beverages.

And if you think bubbles in food are just trivial then you might need to defend that concept against the editors, authors, and presenters and the 2 Bubbles in Food Conferences and the 2 books of proceedings that came from them.

Bubbles in food -

Beer, champagne, bread, cakes, biscuits/cookies, bubbled chocolates, the crema on an espresso, the  foaminess of  lattes or meringues, expanded extruded snack foods, the giant bubble that is pita bread baked well.

We clearly love bubbles – one of the seemingly most trivial and often most ephemeral structures in foods.

pain l ancienne crumb 2



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