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 [...]

Fabulously fun, but serious thought has gone into this… [See the BFCTL August24 post "Spot the deliberate error" for a commentary on the method] From The Science Creative Quarterly at the Univ. of British Columbia. click here… HOW TO BREW BEER IN A COFFEE MAKER, USING ONLY MATERIALS COMMONLY FOUND ON A MODESTLY SIZED OCEANOGRAPHIC [...]

A new post “Forays in Fermentation” from Jeremy at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, via Research Blogging highlights two recent papers on fermentation that go beyond the usual beer/wine paradigm that I see in some students that choose our fermentation option. The papers are Nout, M. (2009). Rich nutrition from the poorest – cereal fermentations in [...]

We use silly putty in class, both the Food Systems Chem and my graduate Food Polymer Science classes,  to get a handle [literally] on aspects of non-linear visco-elasticity of materials. Mike the Mad Biologist at ScienceBlogs linked to this video story at 30threads. It pays to know your raw materials Don’t mix up your mung [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]