JOURNAL TRANSCRIPT
RS6_t.txt Advances in Flavor Technology Aaron Graham [1]Morning. How’s everyone doing today? Good. Excellent. I’m John Marcy. I’m with the University of Arkansas, and it’s my opportunity to help moderate this session ... session. Today’s speaker is Mr. Aaron Graham with Griffith, and Griffith is sponsoring this session. He’s a senior flavorist, and Aaron, on behalf of the Reciprocal Meats Conference, we’d like to give you this pointer to keep, and you can use it. Please take it with you when you .... Great and thank you very much. Thank you, Aaron, and if you would, tell them a little bit more about yourself, if you care to. Sure. Good morning, everyone. My name’s Aaron Graham. I am a senior flavorist at Griffith Laboratories, a flavor chemist. I’ve been in the industry about 15 years, in the flavor industry, that is. I’m a certified member of both the British and American Society of Flavorists and currently on the board of the American Society. Really, you know, what do I do—heavily involved in the research and the development of flavor technologies, and some of those flavor technologies are employed and applicable to the meat industry. So it’s my pleasure to be able to share some of those with you today. Figure out how to work this thing. .... [2]So some of the technologies I really wanted to talk about were sodium reduction, very briefly discuss why reducing sodium is important, some of the systems that are available to us to do that, and more importantly, really highlight what we call flavor perception technology, which is a method the flavor industry is working on to try to help us reduce sodium in food products. Secondly, looking at masking of undesirable flavors, and we’re going to concentrate on two: lactate, which you may disagree is undesirable, but in some products it may be and feed-induced flavors, and lastly, we’ll look at heat-stable flavors, why they’re important, various types of heat-stable flavors and the benefits and limitations between them. [3]So very quickly, you know, why do we want to reduce sodium? I think as a nation, as consumers, public awareness is pretty strong these days about the negative effects of too much sodium in our diet. Of course, you know, we all need some sodium. Unfortunately, Americans consume, you know, far too much sodium. You know, we’re talking two to three times, in general, and interestingly enough, the vast majority of that sodium, or salt, is coming from processed foods, so as an industry, I think, and as food type people, I think we have, you know, an obligation to really take this seriously. [4]So what do we have to help? Well, first of all, let me say it’s not that easy just to take salt. We’re not talking about salt, I’m going to be talking about sodium chloride, so if I just say salt, I’ll be talking to sodium chloride. But consumers, we as consumers like the taste of salt, unfortunately, which makes it very difficult to just remove that. I mean if we’d just say, “Okay, our foods are too high in salt. We’re going to take 30% out,” we’re going to negatively affect the taste, the palatability, the consumer preference of that product. [5]So really, you know, we have to look at various systems to try to bring back of that flavor, the good attributes. Probably the first one that people turned to, the industry turned to was potassium chloride. I’m just going to slip through these really quickly. Then we had a raft of other things, yeast extracts, protein/peptide technologies, potassium chloride flavor systems and I will talk about that a little bit more. Then relatively recently, relatively, we’ve seen things like sea salt, low-sodium sea salt, and we will talk about that briefly as well, and more importantly, flavor perception technology where I’ll center the discussion. [6]I did want to point out that I’m not here to market any one of these things. You know, in reality, there’s no silver bullet, I don’t believe, that’s going to help reduce sodium, reduce salt in meat products. Often, it’s a combination of many and it really depends on the application, the protein, what’s happening with it. But looking at some of these things, potassium chloride—it’s a salt that has a salt, sodium chloride-like taste. It’s functional, you know. It does have a positive benefit as far as the ion strength, water-holding capacity in meat. Its negative attributes really are it has a bitter metallic taste when used at high levels. And Page 1
RS6_t.txt so really, some of the other things that people have looked at are yeast extracts, and the yeast industry has come on leaps and bounds when it comes to what are called high nucleotide yeasts. These are yeasts that have high naturally-occurring ribonucleotides, which are flavor enhancers, some of them up to say, 20% naturally-occurring nucleotides, and what these do are provide that enhancement. If we think about salt, salt probably has three very strong, main attributes in meat products. It’s functional, you know, it has a positive benefit on a water-holding capacity, it has a salt taste. Sodium chloride has a taste of its own, which we as consumers like. Thirdly, it’s a powerful flavor enhancer, so what the yeasts are doing are bringing back some of their enhancement value that we might be missing if we reduce salt. Peptide technologies—very similar. These are often based on dairy products, things like cultured wheys and again, we’re talking about naturally-occurring nucleotides and glutamates. So we’re getting some of the enhancing potential of salt, but we could be missing that salt taste. Potassium chloride flavor systems—what I mean here is it’s a system that’s basically, let’s say, a 95% potassium chloride, but it also have some flavor ingredients added to it, and these are typically added to really suppress or mask that bitter metallic note, so it’s sort of, you know here’s potassium chloride, but you’re not going to get so many peaky, you know, off sort of flavors if you use it as a reasonably high level. Targeted sea salts—interesting. I’ve seen a few come to the market very recently, and these are naturally-occurring sea salts that are, I guess you could say naturally low in sodium or lower in sodium, perhaps 30% lower than typical sodium chloride. That bulk is typically made up with other, well with things like potassium and magnesium which can be considered healthy minerals. What I have found is that they often come along with trace amounts of various other minerals which can contribute to flavor and may give it a slightly different flavor than typical sodium chloride. So where I really want to talk about is the flavor perception technologies, and the basis of these are systems that activate, excite the taste receptors on the tongue to make us perceive a greater level of salt than perhaps is really in there. They typically combine a salt taste and enhancement, which is a benefit. They don’t typically provide any functional benefits. [7]How do they work? And this information, right, I should say is in the public domain. It’s not proprietary, so I’m happy to share it with you, but as I said, taste perception technology, flavor perception technology really tries to excite the taste cells, so when we eat tastants, food molecules typically dissolved in saliva, they come into contact with the taste buds and the typical tongue will have around four thousand taste buds on it. They’re found in various shaped papillae, and these are scattered through various regions of the tongue. Now the taste buds themselves are bundled bunches of taste cells almost like an onion. [8]And the process of tasting, or basic taste, is when the tastants or food products come in contact with these taste buds and taste cells, a signal is sent through the cell, through the efferent nerve to the brain where we recognize it as a taste. What was I going to say? What we’re talking about here are basic tastes. When we’re eating, obviously much of it is aroma, which would go through a different process through the nose, so basic tastes—saltiness, sweetness, sourness, bitterness, umami type characters, MSG-type characters. I think I'll go back quickly. So we’re talking about taste cells and signals being sent through the taste cells, and this is really what flavor perception technology is trying to manipulate, I guess. And this is the taste cell, so think of this as one of those function taste cells. Depending on what the tastant is, various signals would be sent to the brain. If we’re talking salt, sodium chloride being an ion, there is a specific sodium channel that we perceive sodium through, and basically what happens is, you know, sodium will come in contact with the taste cell, it’ll hit depolarization, the signal will be sent through, and that’s when we recognize hey, this meat product is salty. What the flavor perception technology is trying to do is really work at the sense base and excite that area, so instead of—this is not really how it works—but instead of having a few signals saying, “This is salt,” maybe we’ll have this many signals saying, “This is salt,” until our brain says “Okay, this is perhaps a little bit more salty than it is.” There’s a number of these type of technologies on the market at the moment. You know, if you look at most of your leading flavor companies, they will have flavor perception technologies from description. How they Page 2
RS6_t.txt actually target this site, probably they’re all working in slightly different areas, or they’re coming up with their own solutions, but basically the principle is the same throughout. [9]Moving on to the second point or theory that the flavor industry is actively working on is masking abundant, undesirable flavors, and one I wanted to look at was lactate. Lactate can have a beneficial flavor. It can have a nice flavor, depending on the application it’s used in and the level it’s used in. Sometimes it is perceived as a undesirable flavor, especially if used at elevated levels, and the flavor industry is actively working on systems that basically can mask the taste of lactate. This is from either sodium or potassium. So let me see. Some of the areas that the industry is actively researching for masking lactate probably fall in three areas. First of all, we have what we call ‘brown’ flavor compounds, and ‘brown’ is a word that describes a huge family of flavor compounds. They give a sweet, brown taste, so you think maple, sort of crusty bread, vanilla, that sort of thing, and we’re talking maltols, vanillins, furaneols, there’s many, many more, and what we think these compounds do is really level out the spikiness of lactate. So if you are getting a lactate hit, typically it’s quite spiky. What I mean by that is you’ll taste it, you’ll have a strong impression of lactate, which will then pull away pretty quickly. What these compounds tend to do is sort of slice that in half, so you really have prolonging slightly the taste of lactate, but it’s been suppressed quite a bit, and then an overall taste perception point of view, that’s probably a good thing. Secondly, we have ‘sweet’ or sweeter botanical items, specifically glycyrrhizin. I can’t quite get my mouth around the whole chemical structure, if anyone wants to throw it out there, but what this is is it’s actually found in I want to say ... perhaps, and it’s actually a sweet compound that’s about 30 times sweeter than sucrose, very sweet, but it doesn’t—how do I say this? If used at the right levels, it doesn’t really come through as a huge sweet hit like an artificial sugar would. What it does do is it sort of semi-coat the taste buds and provide sort of a coating or a masking effect on the taste buds, which is probably similar to the third area of research, which is really chemicals or flavorants that interfere with the process that the responses go to the brain. And this sort of research is happening both at flavor companies and at what I would call specialized ... companies, particularly, you know, in people like Senomyxis in California or New England in New Jersey that specialize in really identifying molecules that affect the taste process. [10]The second undesirable type flavor I want to talk about is feed-induced flavors and more specifically, grass-fed flavor in beef. Funny enough, I was reading a poster there on the wall from North Carolina State University that was actually talking a bit about this. Grass-fed flavors in beef, from my point of view, are not necessarily a bad thing. There’s obviously a good population of people out there that like the taste. There’s a perceived health benefit to that. I actually grew upon grass-fed beef and I love it. However, domestically, I guess the majority of people prefer the taste of corn-fed beef, and so what the flavor industry has been researching quite actively is ways to mask the grassy effect of grass-fed beef or perhaps change that slightly, to almost push it slightly into a corn-fed type of character. I guess it’s from looking at the differences and I don’t know, perhaps you know more about this than me, but you know, if you’re looking at grass-fed steers, they’re significantly higher in terpenoid compounds, and these are probably giving it that green, what we would call the typical grassy-green character, and I would imagine that this character is going to be the same from the raw, uncooked, through to the cooked. It’s probably not going to change all that much; whereas, some of the fatty acids would no doubt be really contributing to the grass-fed, oily flavor post-cook. So I’m guessing that most of these are going to be oxidizing, natural oxidation reactions during cooking and so it’s not actually the direct acids themselves, but probably the bi-products of. And you know, cooked beef, you’ve got higher levels of the tetra- and the hexadecalactones and one high levels of monounsaturated and 6-polyunsaturated. [11]So what is the flavor industry doing in this area to sort of help either mask grassiness or manipulate it to taste a little bit more like corn-fed beef? There’s a few areas. The main one is probably fat or fatty acid type flavors containing Page 3
RS6_t.txt compounds that are found in higher concentration in corn-fed beef. Now the trick is, and where most of the research is going, is really understanding out of all those compounds that are found in—let me get this right. Out of all those compounds that are found in grass-fed steers, which ones are actually contributing post-cook to that grassy note? You know, some of them are going to be flashing off, some of them are going to probably be forming preferential flavors, so which ones are actually post-cook, reacting to really contribute to that grassy-oily note, and what flavors in corn-fed are really contributing, they’re preferential, giving it that good flavor? So fatty flavors are really trying to bring back the notes or provide the notes that can then be available for reaction and for flavor generation. Excuse me. Okay, secondly, I guess, the masking thing again, and you know flavor masking is a huge, huge area in the flavor industry, masking of all sorts of things, but for this particular application, masking of that terpenoid, that green terpenoid flavor. Not easy, to be honest. They’re not easy type of characters to mask, and still a long, long way to go there. It’s a little hint. One interesting area that sort of amused me slightly when I first heard about it—and I still can’t quite get my mind around it, to be honest—is using corn protein-derived reaction flavors. You don’t know what reaction or processed flavors are? Yeah. Flavors that are generated through the heating of proteins and producing sugars, similar to what would happen in a beef product when cooked. And why I still can’t quite get my head around it is obviously, it’s not the corn itself, but the corn derivatives that are really forming that grassy flavor in beef. It’s the metabolites that the cow is producing from eating corn, I’m guessing, which is why I can’t quite get my head around why a corn-derived processed flavor would help, but it does. And I guess in one respect, you know, you slightly sort of are what you eat, so bringing back some of those corn notes, it does help. And you know, really combinations of these are probably being used to really try to come up with the best solution, and this is really still, in my opinion, ..., but I think there’s interesting possibilities. [12]And lastly, heat-stable flavors. Why are heat-stable flavors important to say, the meat industry? Meat processors and manufacturers don’t want to be putting flavor into their product to have it sort of disappear when we’re cooking or before cooking. You know, flavors often cost a bit of money, and more importantly, they’re there for a reason. They’re there for consumer preference. You know, flavor is what people like about eating, typically. So how does the food industry tried to address this? Three areas, mainly. The first two, to me, sort of seem like, you know, huh. The first one is if a flavorist has a choice of multiple compounds that provide a similar flavor, so they’re after a sort of a roasted beef type character and they have ten to choose from, pick the most heat-stable. Okay, all right. I would hope that most people are doing that anyway. Most flavorists are doing that anyway. Secondly, what the flavor industry has been doing traditionally is trying to identify those notes or those compounds that are subject to being flashed off during heating and compensating for that, adding them at high levels so that if you tasted them fresh, it would seem unbalanced and not a great flavor. But it’s after cooking, once that’s sort of all evened out that you’re going to get hopefully the desired flavor profile. And lastly, encapsulates and that’s where I really want to sort of want to talk about a bit more. [13]There are many encapsulation matrices on the market, not all supplied by flavor companies, but probably the bulk of well, much of the research is being done by flavor companies, and these are just a few, but probably many of the main ones that have ben employed in the meat industry. First of all, and what I didn’t mean about these, these are the actual shells themselves, so this is what beef flavor is encapsulated in. So first of all, looking at carbohydrate matrices—probably been around for a while, reasonably cheap. The fact that they break down in water, in home moisture systems make them not suitable for all meat applications. Fat and lipid-based—again, been around for a long time. The fact that it’s a fat matrix, flavors do dissolve very well in fat. They are shown very well in fat is a good thing. They are limited to the fact that, to the melting point of that fat and they’re limited in some applications where, say frying oil, where the encapsulate itself is going to break down, possibly pre-cook. Protein or polymer—this is where a lot of research is being done in the flavor industry. The perceived benefits are high thermal stability. It’s a good thermal stability. It’s a true core. It’s a true Page 4
RS6_t.txt encapsulate, typically. Its limitations could be negatives about the protein or polymer itself. Maybe a lot of them are from GMO sources or the labeling is not always perfect. Yeast cell is a very interesting one, and what I mean by ghost yeast cell is the ETU shell, so the proteinaceous material has been removed from the yeast and basically left with the shell, which flavor is basically encapsulated into very good thermal stability. Another great benefit is that they don’t really dissolve in water or oil. Really, the release mechanism is sort of on the tongue. They can be expensive so they’re not always applicable to all applications. And lastly, liposomes—again, this is an area of intense research in the food industry. Liposomes are actually very familiar to the drug industry and have been used for many, many years with very good results. Again, the benefit of liposomes, but the main benefit of liposomes is that you can encapsulate water and oil systems, so most encapsulate forms were limited to encapsulating one type of flavor, maybe more of an oil-based flavor than what may be more of a water-type flavor, but liposomes, you can encapsulate both types, so you often get a more fuller flavor. Good thermal stability. As I said, well mainstream in the drug industry, it’s still pretty new to food, so I think we’ve still got a long way to go, but there’s interesting possibilities in that area. [14]And I think that’s about my time we’ve got, so thank you. I guess questions? [15]Questions and answers.
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