Dr. Obvious has been hunkering down, social distancing and, well, eating more than he should during the D-variant and Omicron surges. He’s a good man, at heart, but can’t beat his bad habits. Nor can he suppress a primal urge to point out ridiculosity wherever it rears it’s green, furry head…
Watch what a high-powered waterjet machine is really intended to do…
So… A team of otherwise serious, grownup researchers recently concluded a study aimed at finding a new way to keep fat-free Chocolate Milk rich and creamy longer on the shelf – without the usual, time-honoured emulsifying additive. That substance is carrageenan, and I was under the impression it was extracted from a plentiful seaweed known as Irish Moss, used for centuries in traditional British and New England cuisine. And, as such, it should be a welcome ingredient in the clean food and vegan-vegetarian communities.
But as far back as 2015, a controversy was brewing about the ‘side effects’ and alleged deleterious effects of eating the stuff. An article in the July issue of Scientific American that year went into great detail about the alleged dangers of consumning carrageenan: “Some scientists have presented evidence that carrageenan is highly inflammatory and toxic to the digestive tract, and claim that it may be reponsible for colitis, IBS, rheumatoid arthritis, and even colon cancer. Equally respected scientists have detailed the reasons that this evidence is flawed and misleading, concluding that there is no valid reason to ban its use.”
The disagreement was never resolved, and the U.S. government even prepared a plan to ban the use of carrageenan in food products – but never implemented it.
And the beat goes on…
The controversy has never really subsided, which may be why food scientists have been moved to explore new ways to achieve the same smooth, viscous consistency in commercially-made fat-free chocolate milks and other products.
Which brings us to the new report from the team at Penn State University about their success using a mechanical method to emulsify fat-free chocolate. We specify ‘chocolate’ milk because the researchers say the cocoa particles in the mixture play a key role in their process.
What they did
An abstract of the report tells us the team left no experimental stone unturned: “Researchers thermally treated fat-free chocolate milk formulations containing skim milk, cocoa powder and sugar and then processed them using high-pressure jet technology from 125 to 500 megapascals. The viscosity, flow properties and stability of chocolate milks treated with high-pressure jets were compared with chocolate milks that did not undergo high-pressure jet processing, prepared both with and without adding carrageenan.”
What they found
“As expected, carrageenan-free chocolate milk exhibited immediate phase separation of the cocoa powder, whereas formulations containing carrageenan were stable for 14 days, with cocoa particles not dropping out of suspension. However, the researchers observed increased stability with increasing jet processing pressure, with maximum stability achieved when chocolate milk was processed at 500 megapascals.”
The takeaway
It looks like all the dairies have to do is buy pressure-jet machines and drop the carrageenan.
Dr. Obvious un-bites his tongue
First of all, to get 500 megapascals of pressure in your jet, you need a very special machine. A machine designed to cut metal. Availability is not a problem – but price may be.
According to the folks who make the machines, even small commercial water jet setups cost $60,000 and up. And they cost at least $20 an hour to operate – exclusive of the wages and benefits and so on of an operator.
So, let’s say that your average dairy would need at least a $100,000 machine and two qualified operators (one principal plus a back-up vacation and fill-in person). Give the duty person $20 an hour and schedule a regular 40-hour week. That works out to $30,000 a year. Operating costs at the minimum $20 per hour translate to $40,000 a year. So, the total (conservatively estimated) cost to acquire the machine and operate it for the first year come out to: $170,000. And every year after that, it’ll still cost $70,000 to run.
Now… How much fat-free, organic, vegan chocolate milk can a dairy sell over a year? Not enough to cover the cost of pressure-jet processing, I’ll wager.
And add into all the foregoing, there is currently no equipment in existence designed to perform the job the researchers have prescribed. They used highly-modified commercial metal machining gear, and make no mention of what that cost them.
Obvious drawbacks
The researchers admit the obvious drawbacks to their plan: “High-pressure jet processing of food is a completely new concept, [team leader Dr. Federico] Harte pointed out, and he has been experimenting with the idea for about six years at Penn State. His work on the technology in a pilot plant in the Rodney A. Erickson Food Science Building is unique because it uses an intensifier pump the size of a subcompact car to spray milk through a diamond or sapphire nozzle. The liquid exits the nozzle as a jet of fine droplets that collide with the air, forming an aerosol. […] This equipment is used for cutting metals. It’s a water jet instrument that is used for cutting tough materials such as marble or stainless steel.”
“To appreciate the pressure developed by the pump that processes the chocolate milk, Harte offers this comparison: At the bottom of the Mariana Trench – the deepest point in any ocean – the pressure is 100 megapascals. “We are applying five times that pressure, 500 megapascals,” Harte observes. “The liquid, as it leaves the orifice, is moving at Mach 3 – three times the speed of sound.”
Do we really need hypersonic chocolate milk?
“Anyway,” Dr. Obvious concludes, “The last thing we need, here and now, with millions starving every day all around the world, and climate change baking more and more arable land out of existence, is hypersonic, organic, vegan chocolate milk.”
That’s hard to argue with.
P.S.: At the bottom of the abstract, in small print: “The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the National Dairy Council partially funded this research.” Who provided the rest of the funding, I wonder?
~ Maggie J.