When San To Chan efficiently defended their PhD thesis, they obtained a present of saltwater taffy to rejoice and could not assist being intrigued by the taffy’s uncommon consistency: someplace between a stable and liquid. That led to experiments investigating the taffy’s rheology—the way it deforms in response to utilized forces—and the way the substances and taffy-making course of contribute to that rheology. The outcomes are described in a brand new paper printed within the journal Physics of Fluids.
“Taffy is a viscoelastic material—it has properties between a viscous liquid and an elastic solid,” said Chan, now a postdoc in the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT Media Lab. “Comparing the deformation behavior of commercial taffy to those of different lab-made sugar syrups and lab-made taffies allowed us to identify the most important taffy ingredient (and material structure) that governs taffy rheology.”
It’s simply the most recent instance of a burgeoning space of analysis specializing in the science of meals—one thing that is often on the menu right here at Ars. For occasion, in 2020, physicists examined the physics of wok-tossed fried rice and located that the key to an ideal dish (i.e., properly browned however not burnt) was a well timed mixture of side-to-side and see-sawing motions whereas cooking. In 2022, MIT physicists coined the time period “oreology” for his or her research of why—when twisting two Oreo cookie halves aside—the creme filling sometimes sticks to just one chocolate wafer.
The pandemic impressed physicists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to analyze the physics of cooking pasta—first conducting house experiments, then repeating these with higher precision within the lab as soon as the college reopened after lockdown. The most shocking discovering was that the pasta noodles elevated in size the longer they have been cooked. There have been a surprisingly giant quantity of scientific papers in search of to grasp the assorted properties of spaghetti, each cooking and consuming it—the mechanics of slurping the pasta into one’s mouth, for example; spitting it out (aka, the “reverse spaghetti drawback”); or exploring the query of find out how to get dry spaghetti strands to interrupt neatly in two, reasonably than three or extra scattered items.
Earlier this 12 months, scientists explored whether or not making kimchi in conventional earthenware vessels generally known as onggi leads to one of the best kimchi. Answer: it does; the porosity of the onggi’s partitions assist probably the most desired micro organism proliferate through the fermentation course of. Other scientists have studied the construction of cheese; investigated the composition and circulation of gluten-free batter and breads; found why strands of honey can get so lengthy and skinny as they drip with out really breaking; found out a option to get cocoa butter to distribute extra evenly in chocolate to boost the perceived texture; studied why Brazil nuts rise to the highest of a can of combined nuts (aka the “Brazil nut impact”); and found out find out how to “tune” the circulation of Swiss cheese fondue by including cornflour or wine.
Chan et al.
“Studying the bodily rules related to manipulating totally different meals may, in flip, stimulate discoveries of scientific, engineering, and engineering significance,” Chan et al. wrote of their paper. In the case of saltwater taffy, a greater understanding of its rheology, in addition to that of different sugar-based confections, might allow artisans “to govern the fabric higher, resulting in novel methods for creating designs with excessive inventive and cultural worth, in addition to enhanced management of their texture and mouthfeel.”
Saltwater taffy is a bit of a misnomer in that salt water is not an ingredient. Taffy is simply sugar, corn starch (for a clean texture), corn syrup and butter (as interfering brokers to maintain the sugar from crystallizing), glycerine (for a creamy consistency), salt, water, meals coloring, and flavorings. The (probably apocryphal) story behind the title entails an Atlantic City sweet retailer proprietor within the Eighties named David Bradley. His retailer on the boardwalk flooded in 1883, soaking his merchandise, and when a little bit lady got here in asking for a chunk of sweet, Bradley joked that every one he had was “saltwater taffy.” The title caught, and the sweet grew to become immensely common; it is nonetheless a staple of US coastal cities.
The primary taffy substances are mixed and delivered to a boil—historically in copper kettles—then laid out on marble slabs to chill. When it’s cool sufficient to deal with, the taffy is pulled and stretched into giant bands, trapping air between the layers to make sure the ultimate sweet stays smooth and chewy. Early on, this was finished by hand in so-called “taffy pulls,” however because the twentieth century dawned, there have been many US patents for taffy-pulling machines to deal with this strenuous work.