Food scientists cook up healthier chips that don’t taste awful
It’s hard to stop after eating just one chip – and that’s kind of their whole problem. This popular, fried, salty snack is loaded with unhealthy fats, oils, and other unwanted ingredients that are linked to many health problems. Unfortunately, these are also the flavor profiles that humans are evolutionarily programmed to crave.
After decades of tinkering and experimenting, there still isn’t an alternative that offers that perfect (yet still nutritious) flavor profile. Even when replacing cooking with frying, the cooking heat often reduces the overall nutritional value of foods. According to Chang Chen, a food scientist at Cornell University, combining beets with a technique called microwave vacuum drying (MVD) could be the solution snack lovers have been waiting for.
“We wanted to produce a healthy snack from whole vegetables, with all-natural ingredients and high fiber,” he explained in a university profile. “We thought, ‘What if we could design the process and get the same texture without adding oil?’ »
Chen and his colleagues detailed their approach in a study published in the journal Innovative food science and emerging technologies. MVD removes moisture from the root vegetable in the same way as frying or baking, but faster and at a lower temperature. Because of this combination of cooking factors, nutrients that normally deteriorate during long drying cycles remain in the food. At the same time, MVD retains the starch necessary for the characteristic texture of chips.
While potatoes are the go-to for such snacks, beets are far more nutritious. In addition to being an excellent source of fiber, they are rich in vitamins and minerals such as vitamin C, manganese, potassium and iron. If you could replace potatoes with beets and still get the same flavor profile, you wouldn’t just replace traditional chips, you could improve them. And that’s exactly what they believe they’ve accomplished.
“We got good puffs, which you usually only see when fried, and they are even crispier than fried chips,” Chen said.
Chen’s collaborator, food scientist Diane Makovic, explained that the chips people love rely on starch because of the way it gelatinizes under heat.
“You need a thin layer of gelatinized starch,” she said. “Puffs form when you use high heat and the water inside evaporates and creates the puff.”
Chen, Makovic and their team believe MVD will not only benefit beets, but also other tubers like butternut squash and traditional potatoes.
“This is what we are going to do in the future. And we hired a new student to work on apples,” Chen said. “It’s all about balancing the properties of foods.”
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