Industrial Applications of Selected <i>JFS</i> Articles

The Institute of Food Technologists recently held their annual event in Las Vegas, Nevada on June 25–28. This year's annual meeting had more than 19,000 attendees, 120 sessions, and 1,200 exhibitors. If you are food technologist and you have never been to one of these meetings, you should go. It is worthwhile to visit exhibitors for trends in new food ingredients; however, many researchers focus on visiting the technical sessions. The overall number of technical sessions can be overwhelming, so it is helpful to narrow your focus by interest area or type of commodity. Descriptions of the technical sessions are available online at https://www.iftevent.org/sessions/sessions for this year's event. It is also worthwhile to be able to access past year's technical sessions. The abstracts for all the previous years’ presentations can be found here: http://www.ift.org/meetings-and-events/past-meeting-resources.aspx. Some of this research is eventually published in the Journal of Food Science. A session that is helpful to those seeking to publish in Journal of Food Science is “Navigating the Peer-Review Process in IFT Journals.” A variation of this session is held each year and the main speaker is Amanda Ferguson, Associate Director, IFT Scientific Journals. Highlights from this month's issue include monitoring sourdough throughout back-slopping; fat structure and ice cream mix viscosity; improving the quality of soybean protein; mayonnaise-type spreads and KCl; testing pomegranate-based products; and beer. In response to the need of a bakery factory, these researchers optimized a method to monitor the dominance of a starter culture in sourdough back-slopping in order to intervene quickly in the process in case of poor performance of the starter. The group optimized a repetitive element-PCR technique directly on microbial DNA extracted from type I sourdoughs for fast monitoring of a Lactobacillus plantarum starter strain throughout daily back-slopping. The challenge was to follow and study the performance of a starter culture directly in sourdoughs without cultivation on selective media. The extraction of good-quality microbial DNA suitable for amplification from a complex matrix such as dough was the first target. The rep-PCR amplification profiles obtained were clearly referable to that of Lb. plantarum P1FMC starter in both co-inoculum trials and back-slopping trials where it dominated the fermentation process. The researchers believe that the method may be applied when a single starter strain is used as inoculum. Although this is not the most frequent case in sourdough fermentations, this technological approach could be taken into account for other applications in food fermentations where one-strain starter cultures are used, or for monitoring microbial biomass production in a bioreactor. 1898–1901 Soybean is an important protein source and is utilized in various food forms, such as meju, miso, and natto, because of its high nutrition and many health benefits. Germination of soybeans causes important changes in the biochemical characteristics and nutritional and sensory improvement. This research explores the combination of germination and enzymatic hydrolysis to significantly affect the quality of the hydrolyzed soybean protein. In this study, soybean seeds were germinated and then subjected to enzymatic hydrolysis. The combined treatment of germination and Alcalase hydrolysis remarkably improved the solubility, emulsification activity index, emulsion stability index, and foaming capacity of soybean protein. Notably, a decrease in foaming stability was detected. The electrophoretic profile showed a weak breakdown of soybean protein during germination. However, a strong breakdown of protein was observed after the hydrolysis. The researchers demonstrated that the pretreatment of protein prior to enzymatic hydrolysis may lead to protein unfolding and increased enzyme accessibility to peptide bonds. Germination is an inexpensive and effective method to improve the nutritional quality of soybeans. A combination of germination and enzymatic hydrolysis may offer a new soybean food processing option that results in a more prominent effect on the quality of the hydrolyzed soybean protein. 1814–1819 Reducing sodium intakes remains a challenge for the food industry. KCl is a potential salt substitute but imparts bitterness when used at high concentrations. Little is known about how oil concentrations affect consumers’ perception of saltiness and bitterness in emulsion products such as mayonnaise containing KCl. These researchers evaluated consumers’ perception and physical properties of mayonnaise-type spreads at various oil and NaCl or KCl concentrations. Consumers evaluated saltiness, bitterness, overall taste liking, and purchase intent. Viscosity, pH, water activity, and consistency/texture were also measured. Generally, spreads containing KCl had higher bitterness and pH than spreads containing NaCl. All spreads containing KCl were penalized for being “too bitter.” This study demonstrated that increasing oil concentration affected consumers’ taste perception (saltiness and bitterness) and spreads’ physical properties including pH and viscosity. The strong association between excessive sodium consumption and hypertension and cardiovascular diseases is pressuring the food industry to find alternatives to replace sodium in foods. The study demonstrated that the composition of food matrices plays an important role in consumer acceptability. This study can help the food industry to understand effects of oil concentrations on sensory properties of reduced-sodium emulsion products. 1924–1934 Considering the positive reputation and high demand of pomegranate-based products, these researchers wanted to quantify the total polyphenols content of these products, not only for health benefits and product labeling, but also for key facts such as traceability and adulteration. The researchers compared the phytochemical content of different commercial pomegranate-based products available on the international market. Commercial pomegranate products including capsules, supplements, juices, and nectars were assayed. The group found that labeling standardization of these products is necessary due to the wide variability among “theoretically” similar pomegranate-based products, due to the wide variability of the key compounds (punicalagins, ellagic acid, and total polyphenolic compounds) among similar-seeming products. The contents of the key compounds should be declared on product labels, as indicators of the potential health benefits, and should replace subjective functional descriptions. 1820–1826 Although there are many factors that govern ice cream texture, effects of fat globule clusters and serum phase viscosity on sensory iciness have not yet fully been explored. Unfortunately, methods of measuring serum phase viscosity are limited, and mix viscosity is often used as an approximation under the assumption that more viscous mixes result in more viscous serum phases. The present work attempts to explore the relationship between sensory perception of iciness and ice crystal size by investigating the influence of destabilized fat and mix viscosity on iciness as well as their effects on other textural attributes. This research provides a better understanding of how the relationships between formulation, microstructure, and sensory textural properties upon consumption can be used to create high-quality ice cream products with enhanced shelf life. The purpose of this work was to investigate iciness perception and other sensory textural attributes of ice cream due to ice and fat structures and mix viscosity. Destabilized fat correlated inversely with drip-through rate and sensory greasiness. In the ice cream mix viscosity study, an inverse correlation was found between mix viscosity and sensory iciness. Ice creams with no difference in ice crystal size were perceived to be less icy when formulated with higher mix viscosity. A positive correlation was found between mix viscosity and sensory greasiness. 1851–1860 The variety of beers available has increased due to the recent emergence of many craft brewing operations, and it has been suggested that this is affecting how consumers evaluate beer. Currently, beer consumers are mostly male; only 20% of women are primarily beer drinkers. The main objective of this research was to compare and contrast descriptions of beer products created by males and females. The preferred attribute elicitation (PAE) method was used to create a description of four beers common to residents of Nova Scotia, Canada. Four PAE sessions were held: two sessions consisted of females and two sessions of males. Four beer samples were chosen from locally-available commercial beers. Both the males and females generated descriptions that included five identical terms; however, they differed in the importance they assigned to each attribute. Notably, bitterness was perceived to be of more importance to female panelists. Throughout the sessions, the craft-brewed beers were associated with considerably more sensory attributes than the macro-brewed beers. The researchers concluded that both the female and male groups found discernible differences between the craft and macro-brewed beers; however, they place importance on different sensory attributes. 1916–1923 This study presents interesting results on how laser-etched pouches can be utilized by the food industry to prevent volume expansion in packages for fermented foods. Laser-etched pouches demonstrated the potential for controlling gas, which in turn maintains the quality of kimchi. The researchers found that the use of laser-etched films could exert marked effects on alleviating the volume expansion or pressure build-up in kimchi packages. According to the degree of laser processing, the headspace pressure, atmospheric composition, and water vapor transmission rate of the kimchi packages were measured to investigate the potential use of laser-etched packages for kimchi. In addition, the pH, titratable acidity, organic acid, and microbial population of the packaged kimchi were examined to study the effect of packaging and storage conditions on its quality characteristics. The results reported in this study indicate that the proposed packaging technologies based on laser-etched pouches can be utilized by the food industry to prevent volume expansion of the packages for fermented foods. 1876–1884

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