Science serves up the perfect bag of chips
Australian plant breeders and food scientists have joined forces to create what is claimed to be the best performance frying oil for for tasty hot chips.
The development, driven by the local canola industry, is called 'Manola', the product of ten years of traditional plant breeding by scientists at the Victorian Department of Natural Resources and Environment and Ag-Seed Research PL, and four years of intensive frying and consumer taste-testing at Food Science Australia.
"Consumers don't like chips which are dark, greasy and off-tasting. So we asked our consumer panel to score chips cooked with six different oils for a range of palate factors such as flavour, colour, greasiness, crispness and so on," explains Dr Martin Palmer of Food Science Australia.
The plant breeders needed the food scientists to develop a battery of rapid tests to report oil performance quality results in time for them to select the best strains of canola for sowing the following season.
The researchers had to work out the fat profiles (the proportion of polyunsaturated, monounsaturated and saturated fats) of the various oil types - and then work out how this affected the taste of chips cooked in the oil. The researchers tested around 12 different varieties of canola.
The most commonly used frying oil is imported palm oil. This is suitable because it's cheap and has low amounts of polyunsaturated fats (the fats which break down easily when heated, giving a rancid taste) and high levels of saturated fats (which are very stable but can pose health problems).
When the food scientists began their work they didn't expect to be able to retain as much monounsaturated and polyunsaturated type oil as is present in Manola. However, much to their suprise, they found that Manola could perform better and longer despite having higher levels of polyunsaturated fats than palm oil.
They still don't understand why this is the case, especially since other oils with the same fat profile don't last as long, but are investigating the possibility that Manola has natural antioxidants that are preventing the breakdown of the polyunsaturated fats.