Tasty Tuesday: Sugar Chemistry

I really should just sent you to Exploratorium which has an excellent section on sugar chemistry, but sugar chemistry is so cool, that I have share it with you myself.  In fact sugar chemistry is so interesting that it supports a whole sector of the food industry.  I am, of course, talking about candy.  Food Scientists typically divide the candy industry into chocolate and non-chocolate candy and most of the non-chocolate candy is made from different forms of sucrose.

If you remember sugar is the common name for sucrose, which has the very confusing chemical name of β-D-fructofuranosyl-α-D-glucopyranoside which is a fancy way of saying that it is made up of glucose and fructose.  In this post, I will interchange the words sugar and sucrose, but in chemistry sugar refers to saccharides which  are considered to be small carbohydrates.

The most important property of sucrose is its high solubility over a wide temperature range.  The different sugar candies are made by heating a sugar-water solution, as the heating time increases water evaporates.  This increases the sugar concentration and the temperature of the solution increases.  The temperature of the solution is dependent on sugar concentration:

Effect of Sucrose Concentration on Temperature

Candy technologists not only control the sugar concentration by heating the sugar-water mixture to a predetermined temperature, they also control the final physical arrangement of the sugar molecules by the other ingredients added and by the way they treat the sugar-water mixture while it is cooling. This determines whether the solution sets in a crystalline form or not.  The non-crystalline form is also known as amorphous.  Thus sugar candies are divided into crystalline and amorphous.

Crystalline candies include fudges, fondant and rock candies. Amorphous candies include cotton candy, hard candy and brittles, where the sucrose has been set into a glass, and caramel and taffy, which are chewy rather than hard.

References

For Figure:

Wikipedia Candy#Sugar Stages

Harold McGee On Food and Cooking 2nd Edition p681

Advertisement

Simple Sugars: Fructose, glucose and sucrose

Glucose, fructose, sucrose

Simple sugars are carbohydrates. Glucose and fructose are monosaccharides and sucrose is a disaccharide of the two combined with a bond.  Glucose and fructose have the same molecular formula (C₆H₁₂O₆) but glucose has a six member ring and fructose has a five member ring structure.

Fructose is known as the fruit sugar as its make source in the diet is fruits and vegetables. Honey is also a good source.

Glucose is known as grape sugar, blood sugar or corn sugar as these are its riches sources. Listed in food ingredients as dextrose.

Sucrose is the sugar we know as sugar or table sugar. Typically extracted as cane or beet sugar. If sucrose is treated with acid or heat, it hydrolyzes to form glucose and fructose.  This mixture of sucrose, glucose and fructose is also called invert sugar.

Nutritionally, these sugars are the same as they all provide 4 Cal/g. This is true for starch and other digestible carbohydrates too. Of the three sugars, fructose is the sweetest and glucose the least sweet, so typically less fructose can be used than table sugar (sucrose) – if sucrose has a sweetness of one, fructose is 1.7 and glucose 0.74

Fructose is more soluble than other sugars and hard to crystallize because it is more hygroscopic and holds onto water stronger than the others. This means that fructose can be used to extend the shelf life of baked products more than other sugars.

Wikipedia has lots information on sugars, including information on the three I am interested in fructose, glucose and sucrose.

Molecular Gastronomy is Part of Food Science

In a recent issue of Food Technology, the magazine for IFT members, Hervé This responds to the suggestion that molecular gastronomy is part culinary art and part science. He gives a very good summary of the differences between cookery/culinary, food science and food technology:

“Cooking is a technique (sometimes an art) and the objective is to make food.”

“On the other hand, molecular gastronomy is a science. It is performed in a laboratory.”

“Furthermore, science is not technology. Thus, applied science cannot exist. Application involves technology (from techne, doing, and logos, study). When examining mechanisms of phenomena, the goal is not to apply knowledge (application), but rather to produce it.”

He admits that he himself had problems during his thesis of separating out science from technology but he states very strongly that molecular gastronomy is science and molecular cooking is using the results from molecular gastronomy to create new food items or improve old ones. This’ Ph.D. thesis, on Physical Chemistry of Materials, was entitled Molecular and Physical Gastronomy or the equivalent in French.

The confusion between the science, art and technology of food is present in food science. That there does not appear to be a final definition of molecular gastronomy adds to this confusion, especially as chefs have taken over this term, rather than using This’ preferred Molecular Cooking. Khymos gives a good summary of the different definitions.

I do have problems with the fact that Molecular Gastronomy is so trendy and considered to be the saving of the world’s food supply.  [So I exaggerate? What’s the problem?] Many articles about Molecular Gastronomy and the restaurants that practice molecular cookery appear to have never heard of food science.  So I appreciated the fact that This states that molecular gastronomy is part of food science but I struggle to place it within the traditional subject areas of food science.  It overlaps mostly with food chemistry.  At least This’ part of Molecular Gastronomy is heavily physical chemistry based.  The research undertaken is more directly relevant to cooking and culinary arts than much of food chemistry.  For example, my research on the Maillard reaction has few direct practical applications, unless you are willing to mix amino acids and sugars together in your kitchen.  I still would not recommend eating the results of my research.

Within the article he gives an excellent summary of what science is – the idea of testing a hypothesis to give new information which increases our knowledge of a system.   I might even use some of these ideas for teaching.

References

Hervé This Molecular Gastronomy vs. Molecular Cooking Food Technology December 2008 (PDF)

Sunday Science Snippet

In last week’s New Scientist I saw a link to this website that has videos for all the elements in the periodic table. The videos are about 3 – 4 mins long. Here is an example with the video for potassium.

It is a good website for any one interested in or learning chemistry.

The Hodge Scheme

This is such a cool reaction mechanism. It was designed by John E Hodge in a what is now a citation classic. It sums up the Maillard Reaction, which is as complicated as the reaction scheme above suggests. This is such a classical scheme that it is known as the “Hodge Scheme”. I find that pretty impressive; it would be great if there was ever a “Lab Cat” reaction scheme.

Hodge was an African American who gained an MA from the University of Kansas in 1940 and worked for the USDA for more than 40 years. Sadly, there was no Wikipedia page for this amazing man, so I started one. If any one knows anymore information about him, please, please add to the Wikipedia page.

Reference:
Hodge, J. E. (1953). “Chemistry of browning reactions in models systems.” Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 1(15): 928-943.

Citation Classic (pdf)

John E Hodge Bio