Bringing food chemistry to life

My job as a cereal scientist sometimes affords me the joy of a full day of baking, product development, and promotion of our work and the farmers who are putting their money where their mouth is and growing food barley. In all the products shown below, the flour has a minimum of 10% stone-ground whole [...]

I’ve been having a work “vacation” – working with Craig Ponsford at the “Ponsford’s Place”  Innovation Center [link] to fine-tune our barley bread formulations. We uncovered some interesting processing challenges that point to the particle size of the barley flour as being a suspect. We played with the water because barley has so much great [...]

Great discussion of the bread-making process by award winning, erudite, and articulate baker Craig Ponsford. Craig is a past chairman of the board of  the Bread Bakers Guild of America and won the French and Specialty Breads category in the 1996 Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie in France, the win helping to energize the [...]

Final lab session of our Food Chemistry class this year. An experience of the effects of pH on browning reactions. We make a variant of traditional soft pretzels, using a rather leaner formula than often used [for us no milk or eggs]. The loss of lactose from the milk and glucose from the egg might [...]

Beating the teapot effect Authors: C. Duez, C. Ybert, C. Clanet, L. Bocquet (Submitted on 17 Oct 2009) Cyrill Duez’s team show that superhydrophobic surfaces stop the tea from wetting the inner surface of the spout and pretty much stop the dripping. Richard Alleyne, science correspondent for the UK Telegraph newspaper, says this backs up [...]

Pita is made from one layer of dough, not as some think 2 layers that are joined at the edges. So how does if puff? The dough is often given a final proof that is drier than for risen breads. When the bread hits the hot oven the slightly dry skin seals. Really thin flat [...]

This is a video of the barley pita pictured below puffing in our oven. click here: puffing pita

Been trying a new bread style this week, as well as using a non-traditional grain in a familiar type of bread. The non-traditional grain was a pita bread made with 50% stone ground barley and 50% stone ground hard white wheat. These were astoundingly successful and the barley adds a unique and attractive character to [...]

Dateline March 27 2009 – Rome – Peter Popham of The Independent (London UK) reports on a new vending machine that ” makes and delivers pizza in three minutes” and which “will make its appearance in offices and factories around Italy from next week“. Others have reported on the machine, but mostly rehashes of the [...]