An Overview of our Work (Part 1: Apples)
Lest you think otherwise, let us assure you that being in Greece is not all good food, beautiful places, and hanging out with new friends. No. We log many a hour working with Dr. George Nanos, either: A) Torturing fruit in his horticultural postharvest laboratory at the University of Thessaly, or B) Collecting fruit for laboratory or (when we can't wait) on-site torture from farms and packing houses around the region. No fruits escape our wrath save those not in season; though thanks to postharvest technologies like controlled atmosphere storage and ripening inhibitors, we can make fruit suffer many months after they are picked. A glimpse of what we do:
APPLES
Given the time of year, we've been working with apples quite a bit. In one experiment, we're helping masters degree student Alexandros investigate the effect of various treatments (hot water baths and exposure to the ripening inhibitor 1-MCP) on apple bruising. The procedure is simple enough: Alexandros mercilessly drops defenseless apples (some straight from the field, others dunked in hot water for a few minutes, others exposed to 1-MCP), one by one, from a given height (30 cm) onto a countertop (that's him in the background):
and then we measure all sorts of apple properties to see the effect. The thing I'm holding above is a colorimeter; with it, we zap apples before and after bruising to measure the extent of discoloration. We then butcher the poor things in various ways to get at other aspects:
As you can see, we stab them with a penetrometer to see how firm they are, we gouge out their bruises to measure their dimensions, we cut out slices for juicing (needed for acidity, soluble solids, and phenolics – a.k.a. antioxidants -- measurements), and even more slices for conductivity. All this takes 8-10 hours for one round, and we're becoming pros at it. Before moving on, here's a shot of how we expose apples to 1-MCP:
Just put them in a plastic bag, open up a bottle with the chemical, and then tape the thing shut for 3 hours. Simple.
In another experiment, we're investigating the efficacy of several different treatments for the prevention of superficial scald (essentially, undesirable discoloration) in apples held in storage for long periods of time. The treatments include the current standard drenching with DPH (diphenylamine), a hot water bath with 1/3 the standard concentration of DPH, and a simple hot water bath. As you might guess, this experiment is motivated by a quest for lower-dosage or chemical-free controls for scald and is, in fact, part of a larger study that is also monitoring DPH residue on apples and DPH presence in the packing-house environment. We're pretty much the grunt labor for this one, dunking hundreds of apples in hot water baths for later measurement (after two months in storage). Putting golden delicious in the murky hot DPH solution:
And pulling them out (ding! they're done!):
All this joy brought to you by your friendly neighborhood fruit mangler:
posted by yoshtigo at 1:42 PM
1 Comments:
Let's eat! The tiny fishes look tastier than Cheetos, and with wine, fruit, cheese and bread, what could be better? As for the penetrator, bruiserator, colorator and tasterator, probably all of which were developed in pre-war Germany, you show that science in the service of cuisine (ie, lazy afternoon lunches) is a very good thing. You are contributing to the advancement of civilization, which reaches it zenith in lazy afternoon lunches. Really. Dad
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