I thought I showcase some of the research work done by my colleagues in the Food Science and Crop Science departments at

Where possible the titles are linked to the abstracts. Depending on where you are you might be able to link through to the full text.

This is not all of them, but it will do for now.

Effect of Various Types of Egg White on Characteristics and Gelation of Fish Myofibrillar Proteins
Journal of Food Science
Volume 74, Issue 9, Date: November/December 2009, Pages: C683-C692
Angela Hunt, Jae W. Park, Akihiro Handa

Antimicrobial Efficiency of Essential Oil and Freeze–Thaw Treatments against Escherichia coli O157:H7 and Salmonella enterica Ser. Enteritidis in Strawberry Juice
Journal of Food Science
Volume 74, Issue 3, Date: April 2009, Pages: M131-M137
J. Duan, Y. Zhao

Negative Roles of Salt in Gelation Properties of Fish Protein Isolate
Journal of Food Science
Volume 73, Issue 8, Date: October 2008, Pages: C585-C588
Y.S. Kim, J.W. Park

Storability of Antimicrobial Chitosan-Lysozyme Composite Coating and Film-Forming Solutions
Journal of Food Science
Volume 73, Issue 6, Date: August 2008, Pages: M321-M329
J. Duan, K. Kim, M.A. Daeschel, Y. Zhao

Beating the teapot effect

A new experience for me that’ll hopefully enhance the blog – a photo journalism workshop with National Geographic photographer Flip Nicklin

Telling stories with photographs – stay tuned for more.

I am on vacation, but others are not…

A couple of good new posts at Khymos to keep you going.

http://blog.khymos.org/2009/09/11/too-many-new-books/

http://blog.khymos.org/2009/09/07/tgrwt-19-tomato-and-black-tea/

…and we should remember that. Except for foraged wild mushrooms, or wild caught fish, or hunted game, or handpicked wild backberries that turn into delicious pies [courtesy of my wife] pies made with farmed wheat for the flour…

Follow the “savory images” link below to see Ag in Oregon at its most picturesque!

Savory Images

“Featuring the bounty of Oregon agriculture—a reflection of the role Oregon State University’s agricultural research plays in sustaining our state’s rich farming heritage. The Savory Images photo exhibit opens August 2009 at the Murdoch Gallery at the LaSells Stewart Center at Oregon State University. It then begins a tour across the state and is available for month-long display during 2009-2010, free of charge“.

Photos are by award-winning photographer Lynn Ketchum and from the pages of the acclaimed magazine Oregon’s Agricultural Progress.

A wonderful exposition…

of the the variety and richness of agriculture and rural life in Oregon. The gallery is well worth a look. Lynn Ketchum works for Oregon State and has taken some shots in our labs. Look forward to more shots from Lynn of our bread and lab in the near future.

Mt Adams, Washington State from Gilliam County OR looking north across the Columbia River valley.

Photo Atribution – me.

“Malt is tricky, and sometimes gross. In my experience, the best you can hope for is vegemite, marmite, or some other yeast extract. If you have chocolate malt balls or some other malt based candy, those can be ground up and used as well”. Andrew Thaler

These “malt” sources don’t have active amylase enzymes – they at best would be an additional source of fermentable sugars and amino acids that would help yeast activity. They would not degrade the starch in the the processed cereals. The repeated extraction through the coffee maker would extract all [most of] the available simple fermentable sugars, a fair amount given that many of these cereals were probably steamed during processing with some thermal starch degradation. The dried fruits would be great sources of fermentable sugars, not just a flavor modifiers.

So what could he do to make this process somewhat more efficient?

If the ship’s bakery had malted barley flour – with active amylases that’d be best – that’s probably unlikely, the ship’s chef/baker would probably use a bread flour that would possibly have malted barley flour added at the mill. This is usually a vanishingly small amount of malt flour, because in breadmaking you only want extremely limited starch digestion for just enough fermentable sugars for the yeast. Adding some of the bread flour (check the label for the malted barley flour – e.g General Mills’ Better for Bread has it – just an example, not an endorsement) and maybe having longer period of digestion for the mash. This would mean that the coffee maker hotplate might be a bit warm and thermally kill the amylases so if you could keep the mash at about 60 deg C** this would maximize the beta-amylase activity and create a wort with the maximum fermentables possible with this crude, but brave, method.

**This should be possible on any modestly sized oceanographic research vessel.

Thanks BarelyWorld

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 RESEARCH VESSEL

By Andrew Thaler

About the post author “Andrew Thaler is a graduate student studying deep-sea biology. When not in the lab, he spends his time out on the water, usually swearing at his boat while simultaneously sacrificing some important tool to Poseidon in a desperate attempt make the motor start. He is also a recreational beer brewer, and these two hobbies have melded together to create this handy guide for when emergency rations run out. He writes at southernfriedscience.com.”

Thanks OSU COAS

+

=

Thanks BarleyWorld

Well – maybe ?

Calculus…

From “Built on Facts” Sunday Function #40. It might make some of those pesky integrals a bit more real for you. These concepts are very important in food engineering, which affects, and is affected by, the chemistry.

Squirrely physics

Image attribution: Matt Springer – Built on Facts

Also from “Built on Facts” from a little while ago, highlighting that “ratios of volume to surface area are hugely important in biological processes” and these include elements related to food processing, like particle size distributions, and hydration rates, and heat transfer.

It is worth reading the article.

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 beans and poppy seeds.  From Science Punk

Wine Authorities: Rosé from the Friday Fermentable

Terra Silligata

Fooducation

I have a link to this blog but it worth highlighting so people remember to go look periodically.  It really worth subscribing to the RSS feed to be reminded.

I really like this site as another great way of bringing food chemistry to life. I think the author, Erik Foodladi,  at beautiful Volda University College in Norway (http://www.volda.org/bilete.php), does a great job.  His blog reports on, among other things, what they are doing in their classes; the latest – food culture students looking at temperatures in cooking pits .

Chocoholic food chemistry aficionados will love recent posts on chocolate processing – and for my former, and future, Food Chem students this becomes a serious method of bringing dispersions to life in a well-loved food. He also reports on spherification and it would be good for the Spring 2009 Oregon State U Food Chem students to go look for another perspective on a lab exercise similar to what we did.

He has another webpage www.naturfag.no/mat, English translation that is associated with the science.norway (naturfag.no) website, a great example of bringing science alive. His page is called “Maturfag” – a play on words in Norwegian that doesn’t work in English.  In Norwegian “mat” is “food” e.g. Matforsk in Oslo is a food research institute (now called Nofima Mat).

Erik also enlightened me about an interesting Swedish guy active in making science real for K-12 students,  Hans Persson. Persson calls it “”Concrete and Creative Teaching in Sciences  …of course it’s fun“. He will be in Tacoma WA in October and I hope I can get to hear him talk, anyone who can get a standing ovation after a conference talk needs to be seen.

On another note

- thanks for the comments from Denise Clark over at Adventures in Wine Food Pairing , another fun and interesting read.

-a which led me to another resource at http://tastybloggers.com/ with a long list of food blogs