Demystifying thickener classes food additives though molecular gastronomy

• Autor(a) principal: Gomes, Lígia Rebelo
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Outros Autores: Simões, Catarina D., Silva, Cláudia
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10284/9940
• topic: Molecular gastronomy; Agar-agar; Sodium alginate; Methylcellulose; Pectin

In order to meet the nutritional needs of the increasing world population, a higher demand for food production seems to be imperative. This challenge is peremptory because it is necessary to find sustainable forms of production that have, in one hand, to meet the requirements of safety and quality and, simultaneously, the increase in demand. One way to achieve such a goal is to reduce waste along the food supply chain, which implies ensuring that most of the food produced reaches the population in conditions to be consumed. Food additives allow manufacturers to overcome the problem of limited supply of natural ingredients, increase the shelf life of food and simplify the complex procedures involved in cooking: they contribute to the reduction of waste and, thus, to the sustainability of nutrition of the global population. Nevertheless, food additives raise a number of ethical issues, such as consumer sovereignty, that is, “the consumer's ability to act in accordance with their informed judgments". In this revision, some of the physical chemical properties of widely used additives belonging to E400 to E490 types, namely alginates, agar-agar, methyl-celluloses, and pectin are revised in a simple manner using models derived from molecular gastronomy. Recipes models are presented to explain how the physical chemical properties allow food processing in order to attain of a particular characteristic of the food formulation. Preparations coming from the discipline of molecular gastronomy have been chosen to illustrate the concepts since they are based in laboratory related procedures and they use only a few ingredients. This work aims to add a valuable contribution for demystifying the use of the referred additives in food processing, thus contributing to rise consumer sovereignty.