Triple flavoured sticks of chewing gum in offing

By IANS
Friday, 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.

Filed under: Medicine, World

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