Hot, cool and bubbly

Although the major reason for using the polyols is their reduction in calories, there is increasing interest in the cooling sensations, says Marie Kozlowski, polyol sales specialist at Cargill Food & Pharma Specialties (www.cargillfoods.com), Wayzata, Minn.

Pop Rocks live again as the not-so-secret ingredient in Mott’s Magic Mix-Ins applesauce.

Snap, crackle, pop

In the 1950s, John Mitchell, a food scientist for General Foods, patented a process that encapsulated carbon dioxide in a sucrose melt, producing an exploding candy nugget. Pop Rocks were introduced in 1973, packaged in a little envelope that looked like a Kool-Aid package. Kids tore the package open and poured it into their mouths, listening to the snap and crackle and licking up the relatively strong flavors.

Then began a strange urban legend. Rumors circulated that a child who represented a major cereal product had blown up from eating several packages of Pop Rocks. Hotlines were set up to answer parent’s questions, and the FDA found the product harmless.

But fighting urban legends is difficult and expensive. General Foods took the product off the market in the mid-1980s. “It was just too much trouble, although it was clearly ridiculous,” said a retired General Foods executive, who didn’t wish to be named. “It’s good technology, though.”

Now off patent, the combination of sugar and carbon dioxide has been used in breakfast cereals, lollipops, as a coating for beverage glasses and in other products.

Recently, Fizzy Fruit Inc. has been launched in Portland, Ore., with the goal of getting kids to eat more fruit by infusing it with carbon dioxide. Galen Kaufman, a Texas neurobiologist, discovered it while he was on a sailing trip. Biting into a pear that had been in a cooler chilled with dry ice, he sensed an unusual fizziness in the fruit.

Kaufman figured out some of the dry ice in the cooler had sublimated, changing from a solid directly into carbon dioxide gas and entering the fruit. He decided to try to develop a commercial product and applied for a patent. Then he contacted OSU professor John Henry Wells, an expert in food packaging, to develop a process of carbonating fruit on a commercial scale. OSU's Qingyue Ling further developed the product and is R&D vice president of Fizzy Fruit. The company is in the formative stages of getting Fizzy Fruit products into grocery store produce sections, schools via vending machines and its own chain of franchised stores.

Scoville tests being replaced by chromatography Scoville units were named for pharmacist Wilbur Scoville, who invented the measurement in 1912. Scoville tests are run using large dilution factors and finding the lowest concentration that a trained panel can detect. Scoville tested peppers by soaking them in alcohol (capsaicin is alcohol-soluble) and adding increments of the alcohol solution to sweetened water. In the case of Japan chilies, it took sweetened water in volumes between 20,000 to 30,000 times the pepper extract before the pungency was barely discernible. So Scoville rated the Japan chilies 20,000-30,000 Scoville Heat Units. Zanzibar chilies were rated 40,000-50,000, and Mombasa chilies 50,000-100,000. Habanero peppers measure up to 350,000. The scotch bonnet, a small, brilliant yellow pepper, is slightly cooler (about 100,000-250,000 Scoville units). Mild bells and sweet banana peppers are usually between 0 and 100 units. A single drop of capsaicin, diluted 100,000 times, can still raise a blister on the tongue of a taster. (One part per million is the equivalent of 15 Scoville units.) This oral test is being replaced by high-pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC), which eliminates differences between tasters. It has also increased the number of tests that can be done in a day. The Scoville method allowed only six samples a day to be run reliably through a taste panel, while HPLC can be used to test about 30 samples in eight hours. HPLC tests are expressed in ASTA (American Spice Trade Assn.) heat units and can be correlated to the Scoville figures. But CODEX standards are expressed in standard Scoville units.