Planters NUT-rition Peanut Butter

A key attribute of my food personality is that I like trying out new food products. I become extremely excited about food products if a technical challenge was combated or the food concept is innovative. 

One of my most recent purchases was Planters NUT-rition peanut butter.  Planters launched three flavors of NUT-rition: Cinnamon Raisin Granola Nut, Berry Nut, and Banana Granola Nut. The names are pretty self explanatory of the addition ingredients.  I purchased the Cinnamon Raisin product because I thought that it would be the most challenging of the three flavors to develop. 

I thought it was an interesting (seemingly simple) idea to incorporate raisins, crunchy granola, fruit, and seasonings into a peanut butter. But there is a bunch of Food Science that must be incorporated in the development.  The water activity (free water that is available to interact with other molecules) of all the ingredients needs to be similar, so that the raisins and the granola can retain it's texture. 

I'm guessing that peanut butter has a low water activity value since peanut butter seems low in water and high in fat.  That means that the additional ingredients (raisins, granola) need to also have a low water activity value.  How does the granola stay crunchy? You would think that any moisture in the whole product would migrate to the dry granola, but I think the rice starch on the granola helps to absorb some of the free water.

I tried to take a picture of the peanut butter with all the inclusions, but this is the best shot that I got. 

Brief information on WATER ACTIVITY (Aw).  Water activity is measured on a scale from 0 to 1.  A cup of water has an Aw=1, crackers have an Aw~0.25.  These Keebler PB&J sandwich crackers are a dual texture product.  The crackers have a flaky texture than the jelly and the peanut butter. Did you ever wonder how the crackers remained crunchy even though the filling seemed to have more moisture?  One way it's done is by adding different ingredients (i.e. sugar, salt, starches) that bind to the available water in a product (in this case the peanut and jelly), so that the water activity of the pb and j is similar to the cracker's Aw. 

Research Chefs Association (RCA) Conference Part 1

We're back from our short but eventful trip to the Research Chefs Association's (RCA) conference. I'll be posting pictures of all the food that we partook in and events that we participated in. Here's one of the highlights of my trip. We met Richard Blais from Top Chef Season 4-Chicago. If you do not know who Richard Blais is, he's the guy who did the "molecular gastronomy" cooking, but wasn't the arrogant mad scientist guy from the previous season. Personally, I think he should have won the season, but Stephanie, the girl who won that season was pretty good too. I just felt that through out the show, the producers were trying to push for a girl to win the season. Stephanie was consistent and didn't mess up in the finale. And if we've learned anything this past season of "Top Chef," a mediocre guy can win just because he did not mess up in the finale (this is in reference to Hosea's win). Yeah, after this season I think I'm going to refrain from adding "Top Chef" to my TV lineup.
When I watch these reality TV shows like "Top Chef" or "American Idol" I end up rooting for the contestants who seem like nice people. For example, my favorite this season of AI is Anoop. Do I think he has the best voice or that he is going to win? No, but I sure hope so. In reality (or in Vegas for that matter) I'm sure the odds are in favor of Adam (the Broadway singer) winning AI this season.
I digressed...my point was that Richard Blais is down to earth. My friends and I concluded that he seems like a star that did not want the spotlight. His "molecular gastronomy" session was speckled with self-depreciating humor and tidbits about "Star Wars" and "Top Chef," but I think that's what made him likable. Blais's "Tongue and Cheek" sous-vide pickled beef tongue and pork cheek with a yogurt ravioli (sodium alginate/calcium lactate reaction) over a picked beet and pear relish, with a horseradish foam all served in a petri dish.
And for kicks (and Derek) I took a picture with Louis Petrozza. I never became a fan of watching "Hell's Kitchen" but I did watch the season 4's finale and I thought this guy should have won that season. After talking to Derek, he said that Petrozza was the guy to watch during the season and he didn't win because he was much older than the girl who won.

So, I did not pull a "Bayless" as we now call it. Please refer to my previous post about my missed opportunity to meet Rick Bayless. When in the company of a famous person or someone I want to meet, I am not going to hesistate for a milisecond. I am just going to tap him/her on the shoulder and introduce myself. I am such a groupie....argghh.

We're off to Texas!

Panel is done! I can have a life again. Well, sort of...as much of a life as a grad student can have. Now SAS statistical software and I are becoming friends (or more like enemies).
A couple of us students are road-tripping it down to Dallas, Texas this week to attend the Research Chef Association's annual conference. Road Trip! Woot woot!
There are so many super cool workshops such as the "Make room for the Millennials:Product Development Geared to Generation Y" and "R&D Insight from Panera Bread: A Fresh Look at the Product Development Process."
Yes, I have "D-O-R-K" written across my forehead, but seriously, this kind of stuff makes me really excited!

On our road trip down to Texas, we'll be "Diners, Drive-In, and Dives"-ing it and some hole-in-the-wall places for yumminess. Get excited!

And gasp...I am not taking my laptop with me. This will be the longest time (~4 days) I'll go without checking my email or browsing the internet. I'm only taking my digital camera, cell phone, and my new camcorder!

My new plant and ramblings about Food Safety

While in Texas, Kendell and I visited an Ikea ( I love Ikea and I wish one would open up in Hawaii). One item which I purchased was a basil plant kit. I've been taking care of it and "feeding" with water and using my OTT-lite for light. The instructions on the package specifically say NOT to put the plant outside. That's a good think because it is currently 26F in Illinois. I'm hoping that in a few weeks we'll be partaking in some fresh basil.
On to the disturbing news of the week....food poisoning. Yes, I think Mike and I got a case of food poisoning on Wednesday night which hit us on Thursday. It hit Mike around 5pm on Thursday and me at about 8:30pm. Since we were not eating the same foods between Tuesday through Thursday, except for dinner on Wednesday night (we ate out), we concluded it was Wednesday dinner. I'll spare you the details, but Thursday night was awful! I ended up drinking lots of water and curling up in the fetal position to go to sleep.

It's funny, just the other day, a few of us in lab were talking about food aversions based on bad experiences. One of my labmates cannot eat orange chicken because it's the last food item she ate before she had meningitis and could not eat for two weeks. I have an aversion against "Berry Berry Kix" because back in Elementary school I used to really like it, so my mom bought boxes of it and that's all I ate for breakfast. I also stopped eating ground beef from 6th-10th grade because I had a stomach flu and my mom was cooking ground beef when I was sick.

This was my lunch today. Lightly flavored water with electrolytes. Oh and some saltines. For the educational part of my blog, here's some basic food safety and sanitation tips:
1. Wash your hands for at least 15-20 seconds prior to cooking (15-20 sec=singing the "Happy Birthday"song twice)
2. Do not cross contaminate your food. If you are working with meat, poultry, or seafood, do not use the same surface to cut your produce.
3. Beware of the "Food Temperature Danger Zone" Avoid keeping foods between the temperature range of 40-140F. This is the prime temperature range that bacteria like to grow. Keep hot foods hot, and cold foods cold.
4. Heat your food up to proper temperatures.
5. "When in doubt, throw it out." If foods do not seem good, the "sniffing test" doesn't always work. If you want to avoid a sore tummy, just chuck it.
6. FIFO (first in, first out). Use the items in your fridge/pantry in a systematic order. Rotate items and consume the older products first.

There are many more rules to follow to ensure safe food consumption, but those are the basics that I can quickly ramble off. We are nearing the Thanksgiving season, so please extra cautious in the kitchen to avoid any foodborne illnessed

I passed!

Recap-
*I passed my Preliminary Exam last week! I just a have a little bit more research, my thesis writing to tackle, and then my defense!

*Mike's home alone for a few days while I'm off to Texas. Maybe he'll blog about his exciting adventures.

*I discovered new dishes that I enjoy: 1) yamaimo okura natto nebaneba bo-ru minus the ikura. It's basically a slimy mess of natto, a grated sticky potato, and okra. Oh, it's great! 2)and chicken biryani, an Indian rice dish.

*I treated myself to a present. "Field Guide to Cookies," by Anita Chu from Dessert First. I'm quite excited about this purchase. I've been meaning to buy this book for a while, but needed to find something else on Amazon so that I could receive the free shipping.

Institute of Food Technologists Conference 2008~New Orleans

Hello NOLA!

By now, I am off to New Orleans for the annual Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) conference . The IFT is an international organization for food scientists around the world. It's a huge organization with over 20,000 members. At the annual conference you can learn about the current food research going on. This includes topics like Food Microbiology and safety issues, nanotechnology, to culinary trends. What's also appealing is the Food Expo with companies showing off and sampling the newest ingredients! Last year adding functional ingredients was big and a lot of companies were incorporating soluble fiber into their products. My body was not used to consuming all that fiber in a short span of time, so this year I will definitely pace myself.

This is the second IFT conference I am attending and it is definitely an eventful one! On top of meetings for the Sensory Evaluation Division and the Education Division, I'll have an oral presentation, oral competition, and the Product Development competition to take part in. Even though it'll be really busy, I'm quite excited about the whole thing! I've never been to New Orleans and I can't wait to take part in the conference!
I've been so busy preparing for this conference that I haven't looked into the restaurants and foods to enjoy. Luckily others have made plans and I'm invited to tag along. I think on tap is a dinner at Oliver's Creole Restaurant, the Crescent City Brewhouse, Coyote Ugly, and Cafe Du Monde(for beignets).

Wish us luck and cheer on the University of Illinois team!

*This was a pre-scheduled post.

Fruit Conserves, Curd, Jam, Jelly, Marmalade, Preserves, Spreads

The other day I was making a fruit filling and was not exactly sure what I was making. When I let my friends taste it, I called my creation a "jam."
So, I'm assuming I have an eager audience who cares about the definitions of the various fruit(also vegetable) preserves. I checked out the trust-worthy Wikipedia and these are the definitions I found:

FRUIT BUTTER: Fruit that is cooked with sugar and blended or sieved to a smooth consistency.

CURD: Composed of a heated mixture of eggs, sugar,
butter, and citrus juice.

JAM: Contains both fruit juice and pieces of the fruit. It is heated with sugar to activate the pectin (natural gelling agent) in fruits.

JELLY: Clear fruit spread made of firmed fruit juice, pectin, and sugar. The pulp of the fruit is strained out.

MARMALADE: Contains sugar, water, citrus rind, and a gelling agent (pectin, gelatin, etc).

PRESERVES=CONSERVES=JAM

SPREAD: A JAM that does not contain any sugar.

Tart Strawberry Jam? Recipe (An estimate because I did not measure)

2 cups of cut fresh strawberries

1/2--3/4 c. granulated sugar1/4 t. tapioca starch dissolved in 2 T. cold water

1/8 t. citric acid

I heated the mixture until it boiled and then reduced the heat to a low simmer. I think it was on the stove for ~30 minutes. I occasionally stirred the mixture and haphazardly mashed the strawberries.

Most recipes I found online included lemon juice and pectin (both of which I did not have at the time). So I decided to put my Food Science education to use and thought about ingredient functionality

"What is the function of the lemon juice?"

Lowers the pH-->Safer shelf-stable product

Flavoring--Contributes to tartness

Sensory Attributes-->Maintain Color (of some fruits, not strawberries)

***Citric Acid***It is an acid, which would lower the pH and serves as a preservative, it has a sour/tart flavor, and is an antioxidant and can help maintain color.

"What is the function of the pectin?"

Gelling agent--> Thickens the mixture

**Tapioca Starch***Starches are great thickening agents and the beauty of tapioca starch is that it results in a shiny clear product, unlike cornstarch which results in a slightly opaque product.

Dry Ice , Carbonation, Grapples, and more

This is what some food scientists do at the end of the semester...

Carbonated Fruit....
We had extra dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) yesterday and started playing with it. E. though that it would be neat to carbonate fruit.
Think about biting into a piece of fruit that has the tingly sensation of drinking soda.
I think it's similar to the infusion method that is used to make"Grapples" which are apples infused with grape aromas. I am not quite sure how the Grapples are infused but the website states that "concentrated grape flavor and pure water" is used.
*Off on a tangent, a few of us "foodie" food science students tasted Grapples at one of our "'Top Chef" socials and and decided that the apples are okay. These apples smell delicious-think Bubble Yum Grape Bubble Gum, but we really couldn't taste the grape flavor.

Back to the carbonated fruit, I started scrounging around the lab trying to find other items to subject into dry ice. We tested an apple, pear, and a spinach leaf. We placed the test subjects into a cooler filled with dry ice and let the carbon dioxide diffuse into the fruit. Dry ice sublimates (goes from solid to gas) at room temperature, so as the CO2 gas was formed, it was trapped in the cooler and entered the cells of the fruit and interacts with the water in the cells.
Anyways, I googled it and apparently other people think that carbonating fruit is cool too. Check out this blog with a chocolate carbonated banana recipe.

The team has spending countless hours on our IFT product development work that I think we're starting to become a bit loopy. :) Nah, we were just being typical food science students.

Restaurant Crawl

Last night the University of Illinois's Association of Food Technologists went on a Restaurant Crawl. Instead of a typical bar crawl, we restaurant hopped. The restaurants included in our stroll included Radio Maria for tapas, Peking Garden for dinner, and Ko Fusion for dessert. The night was filled with fun, food, and chatter. It's always a treat to go out to eat with fellow food scientists. Most of us love food and enjoy deconstructing and critiquing food.

The general consensus was that the tapas were the crowd favorite and Ko Fusion was the least favorite. Let's just say that everyone left a huge portion of their chocolate cake on the table and it wasn't because we were stuffed from the previous restaurants. Some of the comments associated with the chocolate cake were, "Do you think they used lard in the cake?" and "Why is it so dry and dense?" Although my White Dragon Martini (lychee liquor, coconut rum, and pineapple juice) was quite yummy, it doesn't make up for the poor quality cake.
The best dish of the night? The queso de cabra frito from Radio Maria. It was fried balls of goat cheese drizzled with a honey sauce. The honey and the warm goat cheese was excellent!
Thanks to Christy for planning this awesome activity!

yerba mate

i study quite well at coffee shops because i focus more by tuning out other people. plus i avoid randomness in my lab or apartment (a.k.a. phone calls and tv). mike told me that i should spend the $4/drink just to get more work done because the less time i spend in grad school, the more time i have to work a real job and get paid. (says the girl wearing the t&c "one day i'll get a real job" shirt). Yes, this made sense to me, so now my hobbies include hanging out at the coffee shop trying different drinks on the menu.

The food science tidbit of the day. My current drink of choice is yerba mate . It's not really a tea, but it is steeped like tea. It's slowly gaining popularity and is quite popular in Brazil as a source of caffeine. There has not been a lot of research done on yerba mate, but some other Food Science labs are studying it. I don't know enough about it, but in a few years, yerba mate will probably be a quite common word in food speak.
To me, it tastes like your basic non-flavored herbal tea. Quite earthy with bitter afternotes. Flavor-wise I would prefer a good japanese green tea.

i heart fiber

i think that fiber is really cool. when i was in undergrad, i thought that the chapter on fiber was so interesting. soluble versus insoluble...cleaning out your colon....
anywhoo, today i ate a few pieces of an apple and an orange. i don't know if it was the milk i drank this morning too, but i don't think my tummy was used to all the fiber....i still like fiber, and yes, i am a believer of all the cleansing properties of fiber.
that was a little TMI. so to add the little tidbit of food science into my blog. one of the questions that i might be asked is about the safety of raw milk.
here's my thoughts...
i would not drink it.
why not drink the safely pasteurized stuff instead of taking the chance of possible MO like C. jejuni or C. burnetti? Back in the days, raw milk caused a lot sickness (i think the statistic on this was like it caused 25% of the food-related illnesses). here's a list of current outbreaks:
http://www.k-state.edu/media/audio/podcastindex.html
and then this guy Louis Pasteur comes along and figures out that if you heat milk for a long enough time at a high enough temperature, you can kill the pathogenic bacteria as well as extend the shelf life of milk.

sure, some people choose to drink raw milk because they claim that it has a better flavor b/c the lack of heat processing, and it really can be safe. they want to go the all natural route. i don't know. i haven't done enough research on it, but is it worth the risk to put potential pathogens in your body? people like to gamble, so i guess you can't stop people from doing what they want to do.
my advice, if you're sickly, young, elderly, or immuno-compromised. stay away from the stuff. you're taking a great risk especially since your body can't fight off all the pathogens as well as a healthy person. and healthy people also have the chance of getting sick too, so don't do it unless you have to.

The Maillard Reaction

The Maillard Reaction is a non-enzymatic chemical reaction that results in a brown color change in a food product. This is the reaction responsible for the browning of crust, the color of cooked meat, and the brown color of chocolate chip cookies.

A simple explanation of the reaction is:
PROTEIN+REDUCING SUGAR--> BROWN PIGMENT


Of course, it is much more complex than that, but what you really need to know is:
*PROTEIN -a compound which contains an amine group (as in Amino Acid: the building blocks of protein)
*REDUCING SUGAR -a carbohydrate with an aldehyde group or ketone group. It can gain electrons from other molecules and reduce it.
reducing sugars are all monosaccharides (simple sugars-glucose, frutose, galactose) and some disaccharides (ex. lactose-sugar in milk)
This reaction will occur over time, but will occur more rapidly with the help of heat (as in the cookie case, baking)

Sensory Evaluation

I will post pictures of my freezer "adventures" in a little bit. But for the time being, this is a picture of the sensory booths in my lab. We conduct all kinds of sensory tests in our lab and use humans as our "instruments." So this is the view from the servers side of the booth. Behind the wall are the panelists. The servers present food to the panelists through doors (see the foil covered portion), and they fill in out surveys on the computer or use paper ballots.

If this was not entertaining enough, check out this card:

http://www.perfectgreetings.com/index.cfm?action=view&id=12555&scid=0

This is just a hint to what my group is working on for our Product Development class.