More
than ever before, the food industry is finding itself forced, through
outside pressures, to improve constantly its product quality and to
maintain that quality at a consistently high level. Food quality is an
important concept, because the foods people choose depend largely on
quality.
Consumer
preference is important to the food manufacturer, who wants to gain as
wide a share of the market for the product as possible. Quality is
difficult to define precisely, but it refers to the degree of excellence
of a food and includes all the characteristics of a food that are
significant, and that make the food acceptable.
Back in February, Kendra Pierre-Louis of Popular Science wrote this interesting article.
She indicated that ‘Tweaking texture could give us healthy versions of our favourite junk foods—and that's just the beginning.’
She
talks about how she has embraced culinary novelties such as glass
potato chips, grilled whale and poisonous shark but cannot stomach the
sensation of hollandaise sauce.
Apart
from crispy foods like crackling, British consumers embrace
softer-feeling food. Industrialised, processed food is often marketed
as soft and creamy in the UK, with adverts for such foods playing on the
sensual and comfort associations that have set in from a young age.
Our childhood association with pureed food is one of the reasons we turn to soups when we are ill.
The chef Mario Batali says that the single word “crispy” will sell a restaurant dish quicker than any number of clever adjectives.
Picture “aubergines” on a menu. You might hesitate to order them, fearing they would be flaccid or oily, as they so often are. Now think how much more appealing “crispy aubergines” sound. “Crispy” makes everything appear as safe and crunchy as chips.
The word’s universal appeal is a sign of how much we are governed by texture in what we eat. Yet we hardly seem to mention it (unlike in China, where many foods, from fungus to tripe, are prized for texture alone).
Gristly,
gelatinous, bony textures, say in pig's ears or bird's feet, are
usually shunned in the UK, whilst goose intestines, sea cucumbers,
chickens' feet and ducks' tongues are just some of the fiddly,
gelatinous, gristly dishes that are regarded as delicacies.
In
China, kou gan (meaning "mouth-feel") is highly celebrated and texture
in these dishes means everything. In Victorian cookery books, whole
birds and the feet of animals were celebrated with relish, while in
other parts of the world, such as China, foods enjoyed purely for their
challenging textural pleasure are highly prized.
There’s more to chewing than you might think. It’s arguably the first digestive activity that we bring to a meal, and unlike the chemical processes that occur in our gut, chewing falls under our conscious control.
But chewing is more than a digestive aid. It also has a potent psychological function that helps keep body, mind and emotions in balance, according to The Institute for the Psychology of Eating.
The process of sensory evaluation starts with a well trained sensory panel – a group of humans who will judge sensory qualities.
To carry out a meaningful texture profile analysis, a panel of judges needs to have knowledge of the texture classification system, the use of standard rating scales and the correct procedures related to the mechanics of testing. Panellist training should start with a clear definition of each attribute.
Sensory analysis includes use of the senses of smell, taste, sound and touch.
Evaluation of food, pharmaceutical and cosmetic texture by touch includes the use of thefingers, as well as the lips, tongue, palate and teeth in the mouth.
When producing products for consumers, manufacturers endeavour to offer products with a defined uniformly high quality. As would be expected, sensory methods of analysis are subject to wide variability, are labour intensive and therefore expensive. Alongside sensory tests of products by trained tester panels, instrumental measuring methods are used as flanking measures.
