Triple flavoured sticks of chewing gum in offing
By IANSFriday, October 8, 2010
LONDON - Researchers may have cracked the secret behind creating a sweet that replicates the taste of three food items in a chewing gum stick.
Food scientist Dave Hart at the Institute of Food Research (IFR), Britain, believes that recent advances in nanotechnology, which deals with structures just millionths of a millimetre in size, could capture and release flavours in a precisely controlled way.
Hart and his team are experimenting with creating different flavour layers, based on a 17th century ‘preserve’.
The flavours are separated with a tasteless gelatine that stops them from overlapping, with a final dessert taste at the centre, capsuled in a high-tech gel called Gellan, reports the Daily Mail.
In Roald Dahl’s book “Charlie And The Chocolate Factory”, Willy Wonka displays a stick of Three-Course Dinner Chewing Gum which he claims can reproduce the flavours of every individual course of a full meal.
The gum is able to convey the flavours of ‘tomato soup, roast beef and baked potato, and blueberry pie and ice cream’, he claims.
Hart says: “Wonka’s fantasy concoction has been nothing but a dream for millions of kids across the world.”
“But science and technology is changing the future of food, and these nanoparticles may hold the answer to creating a three course gourmet gum.”
He said scientists at the Harvard University have been working on nanostructures called colloidosomes, which can be used to capture ingredients. Their findings could be a step towards developing this gum.
He said: “Tiny nanostructures within the gum would contain each of the different flavours. These would be broken up and released upon contact with saliva or after a certain amount of chewing.”
“The tomato soup capsule would break on contact with saliva, followed by roast beef and blueberry pie in stronger structures - providing a sequential taste explosion as you chew harder.”
The gum would only work as a sweet, however, and would not reproduce the feeling of being full nor would it provide any vital nutrients.
