The today’s paper is an “Aha” paper: not an “I finally found the answer to an urgent question- Aha” but more a “There are papers about that? - Aha”. The paper from Shuying Wei et al. (2017) deals with the question how different cooking/baking methods change the chemical composition in sweet potatoes. Call me stubborn traditional German but I still favour normal potatoes over sweet potatoes, although the latter became more and more famous in Germany over the last year. However, I know many people who like the starchy, sweet-tasting, nutrient rich storage roots which are native to the tropical regions in America. So maybe these people always wondered how cooking change the starch and sugar content in the potato? If so, the paper today gives a detailed answer. Shuying Wei et al. tested four different sweet potato cultivates ( two yellow flesh and two purple flesh cultivars) with three different cooking methods (boiling, steaming, baking) and analyzed the change in dry weight, starch content, sugar composition, sweetness and α-amylase activity (α-amylase is an enzyme which transforms starch to sugar). In general, yellow fleh cultivars seem to contain more sugar that the purple flesh cultivars. The effect of the different cooking methods (boiling, steaming, baking) depend on the cultivate type, but all three cooking methods reduce starch content and create maltose (which can not be found in the raw potato). All in all, cooking increased total sugar content especially reducing sugars which explains why cooked sweet potatoes taste sweeter as raw ones. This is because in the begin of the cooking process the amylase activity is increased (and more starch is concerted to sugar) before the high temperatures stop any amylase activity in the end. “Aha”. "Effects of cooking methods on starch and sugar composition of sweetpotato storage roots."
S. Wei, G. Lu, H. Cao (2017) PLoS ONE 12(8): e0182604.
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IdeaI love to increase my general science knowledge by reading papers from different fields of science. Here I share some of them. Archiv
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