Word: flavorings
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There are a lot of different factors Micheale Kester has to juggle when she invents your next scoop of ice cream. Right now she's not as concerned about flavor or texture--although those are important--as she is about architecture. Kester, a food technologist in the Burbank, Calif., labs of ice cream giant Baskin-Robbins, has been fooling around with an idea for a flavor she calls Cinnamon Bun, but first she has to make sure the stuff will hold together. If you're not careful with the size and number of your chips, nuts or bun bits--what...
...Kester doesn't really have the luxury of guessing. Baskin-Robbins' trademark list of 31 flavors has expanded to almost 1,000 since the company was founded nearly 60 years ago. To keep that number growing, eight food technologists in the Burbank facility each come up with about 20 new flavor brainstorms a year; of all those, perhaps three or four make it to the big leagues. The shelves of canisters filled with Oreos, M&M's and other colorful inclusions that line the laboratory walls certainly keep the ideas flowing. So too does the dream of being the person...
Just how you choose which foods you burn in your chromatograph can make a difference too. A small strawberry may taste different from a plump strawberry; a just-ripe one will taste different from one that has gone pulpier and sweeter. For subtler flavorings, technologists may not want to touch the fruit at all, instead simply sampling the volatile gases it gives off. IFF scientists sometimes place a glass shroud around a carefully cultivated plant in a field or greenhouse, draw off the sweet, rich air with a syringe and use that as their flavor template. "It gives...
Once IFF's analysis labs are done taking the measure of a food and rebuilding its flavor, those flavors are sent out to other labs in the building to determine how they hold up in food products. In the dairy department, flavors are tested in ice creams, puddings and--most challengingly--yogurt. "Yogurt is a very dynamic system," says food technologist Dan O'Brien. "You start off one flavor at the beginning of the product's shelf life and get a very different one at the end." In the bakery department, the scientists fret over how flavors hold up when...
...tiered creation of shaved ice, cherrystone seviche, Malpeque oysters, New England littleneck clams, and shrimp. Diving in headfirst, we slurp the raw oysters and clam from their shells, enjoying their unfamiliar texture and salty taste. When pressed for an adjective to describe the peculiar flavor, FM photographer Hayley B. Barna laughs and says, “They taste like Long Island Sound.” Our raw bar ignorance notwithstanding, the tower was delicious—the seviche was subtle and refreshing, and the clams and oysters delicate and bright...