Chips now come in flavours like cheeseburger. How do food chemists get the taste right?
Chips now come in flavours like cheeseburger. How do food chemists get the taste right?
The humble bag of chips has come a long way, with flavours like cheeseburger, curry, and cucumber now available. To get the flavours right involves a bit of technology — and a whole lot of noses.
Hamish Thompson [runs] the Museum of Crisps, a website that's so far logged just shy of 1,400 different bonafide flavours of chip.
"There's brussels sprout, cappuccino, lamington, and whisky and haggis, to name a few of the weirder ones,"
In a grocer near the ABC Melbourne office, some of the far-out flavours are full meals, such as bolognese, cheeseburger and beef rendang … which taste uncannily like bolognese, cheeseburger, and beef rendang.
So how are these complex chip flavours made, and how do food chemists get them tasting so close to the real deal?
They don't. They never taste like the thing on the package.
It's a mixed bag (haha). Sometimes they do a decent job, sometimes not so much.
I find these complex flavour chips just end up tasting like salt after the 3rd handful.
I just stick with the classics; plain, salt & vinegar and chili.
I mean, a lot of the time it's just a dust of the particular food and/or flavor on the chip. Not like dehydrated cheeseburger, but some combo of dehydrated garlic, onion, tomato, and cheese?
Here in America, we do it by allowing almost anything into our food chain. Yummy cancer...Mmmmmmmmm.