Constitutive Properties of Soft Aerated Food Materials

许多食品和饮料需要气泡来创造独特的质地和味道。如果你不相信这一点，试着用一罐新开的可乐和一罐刚喝了一天的可乐进行品尝。但是，此外，起泡食品和食品泡沫显示出一些我们还不完全了解的有趣的特性。在接下来的五年里，我想研究这些易碎食品材料的特性是如何受到它们所含气泡的影响的。在第一个目标中，我们将研究成分如何影响低浓度和高浓度泡沫食品的物理性质。真正的食物例子是面团(低)和蛋白酥饼(高)。由于气泡在软材料中的分布变化很快，我们还将研究气泡动力学。事实上，在面团等软固体中，气泡大小变化如此之快，以至于我们需要使用地球上最强的光束之一(加拿大光源)来成功研究这些变化。这项研究的一个结果是，通过了解推动气泡大小变化的力量，我们可以创造出更好的充气食品，因为它们是稳定的。在第二个目标中，我们将研究支持许多充气食品中气泡的蛋白质基质是如何通过挤压压力高达8000个大气压的蛋白质分子而受到影响的。这种方法不仅仅是一种学术练习，因为越来越多的人使用高压处理来确保我们的食品既安全又新鲜。从这些加压研究中，我们希望通过精确测量蛋白质溶液的物理性质，得出乳制品发泡蛋白质的基本热力学性质。预期的结果是，这些热力学性质将使我们能够更好地控制高压工艺，为充气食品生产不含添加剂的配料。更多地了解充气食品材料的性质将有助于生物科学，因为它建立了简化原则，可以应用于更好地了解其他软生物材料的性质。加拿大人将受益，因为更好地了解如何处理气泡和食品原料将使食品制造商能够创造出含有更多健康成分的高质量食品，而不会影响原来的味道。

Many foods and drinks need bubbles to create unique textures and flavours. If you're not convinced of this, try a taste test with a freshly-opened and a day-old can of cola. But, in addition, bubbly foods and food foams display some really interesting properties that we don't yet fully understand. Over the next five years, I want to examine how the properties of these fragile food materials are affected by the bubbles they contain. In the first objective we will examine how ingredients affect the physical properties of bubbly foods with both low and high concentrations of bubbles. Real food examples would be dough (low) and meringues (high). Because bubble distributions in soft materials evolve rapidly, we will also study bubble dynamics. In fact, bubble sizes change so rapidly in soft solids such as dough that we will need to use one of our planet's most intense beams of light (the Canadian Light Source) to successfully study these changes. One outcome from the research is that by understanding the forces driving bubble size changes, we can create better aerated foods as a result of their stabilization. In the second objective we will examine how the protein matrix that supports the bubbles in many aerated foods is affected by squeezing the protein molecules with pressures up to 8000 atmospheres. This approach is not just an academic exercise because high pressure processing is increasingly used to ensure that our food is safe as well as fresh. From these pressurization studies, we expect to derive fundamental thermodynamic properties for dairy foaming proteins utilizing precise measurements of the physical properties of the protein solutions. An expected outcome is that these thermodynamic properties will allow us to better control high pressure processing to produce additive-free ingredients for aerated foods. Learning more about the nature of aerated food materials will benefit the biological sciences by establishing simplifying principles that can be applied to get a better understanding of the properties of other soft biological materials. Canadians will benefit because a better understanding of how to process bubbles and food materials will allow food manufacturers to create high quality foods with more healthy ingredients without impacting the original taste.