Food Ultrasound

Some of the most useful ingredients in modern food formulation are also some of the hardest to keep stable. Emulsions, mixtures of oil and water that don't naturally want to stay combined, are everywhere in food manufacturing, from sauces and dressings to plant-based dairy alternatives and, increasingly, the printable food inks used in 3D food printing. Keeping those mixtures stable, especially without synthetic emulsifiers, remains a persistent engineering challenge. A study recently published in npj Science of Food offers a genuinely promising answer, and once again, ultrasound is doing the heavy lifting. Researchers from Jilin Agricultural University and the National Engineering Research Center for Wheat and Corn Deep Processing in China set out to solve a specific version of this problem: how to build a more stable Pickering emulsion gel using two plant-derived proteins, zein (from corn) and soybean lipophilic protein, and whether controlling the power of ultrasound treatment a...