Direct

Reflection 4

What food chemistry is being incorporated within your product that you learned from this course?

• The food chemistry that we have incorporated the most in our Tamales has been marination, bater and breading. The marination of the chicken meat provides an improved flavor, texture, tenderness and juiciness. The main benefit from the marination is the increased shelf life of the product. Increased shelf life makes the product easier to sell to stores and customers because they know they have time before they have to sell or eat the product without it going bad. Marination also increases the yield of the meat which as a business you want because higher yields mean higher profit. The batter and breading part of our product has been played a major role in the the visual appeal and providing the desired tamale taste to the product. For the tamales, we used a pre dust, or flour, to help absorb moisture and allow for better adhesion. Furthermore to assist in the round shape, we use eggs as a batter. The high viscosity of the eggs held the tamales into shape and the addition of Franks Red Hot sauce added to the flavor of the tamales.

The adhesion from the batter and breading made it possible for the tamales to stay in the shape we made them.

What were some of the trials and errors your group encountered when incorporating the food chemistry within your product?

• The main problem our group encountered was getting the tamale taste and flavor from the product. The first few trials we ran did not give the desired flavor of the product. Over time we tried different batters and breading to try and find the right combination that would give us a tamale flavor. We finally found the right mixture by adding chili powder to our pre dust and some Frank's Red Hot sauce to our batter. Another problem we encountered was finding the right size of our tamales. Our dough we used to cover the outside of our chicken would expand after you fry the tamale. This made our product too large and undesirable by consumers. Adding less chicken wasn't an option because we needed a proper amount of chicken in the tamale so the group had to adjust the recipe for the dough to reduce the thickness.

The team is working to shape and form the tamales before we fry them to present for sensory analysis.

How did the information/data from sensory analysis aid in the development of your product?

• The main problem we discovered through the sensory analysis was that the ratio of breading to chicken was off. There were numerous reports of to much breading and not enough chicken. The flavoring, appearance, and texture all scored very high. We did have a problem with the juiciness being poor in the product. To fix the juiciness the group decided to add extra time for marination to give the product that missing uptake in juiciness. The overall acceptability of the product was high but the sensory analysis provided us with the information to make key adjustments in our procedure/recipe to develop a high quality product.

Our Tex-Mex Tamales being prepared for sensory analysis.