An Indian Banquet with Perfect Texture

Indian food is rich, creamy and spicy, with comforting sauces and side dishes of interesting and varied texture.

A consumer acts almost like a Texture Analyser while they are eating a meal. They are constantly sensing force and breaking points with their hands while they tear food and even more so inside their mouths while they bite, crunch and chew. To ensure they have a satisfying experience, it is important to make sure these forces are all at the optimum level.
The first dish that comes to mind when thinking about Indian food is a meat or vegetable curry, which come in a large number of variations. For example, chicken korma should have tender meat and a thick, creamy sauce. 

MORS blade

Cooked meat samples can quickly and easily be measured for tenderness by using a MORS Blade. This is a 10mm straight scalpel that is pushed into the sample surface by the Texture Analyser. It is beneficial to align the blade across the meat fibres to give a full picture of the maximum toughness that will be felt when the lamb is bitten into. 

The creaminess of the korma sauce can be measured using a Back Extrusion Rig test, forcing a Perspex disc into a pot of sauce, and measuring the forces exerted as the disc moves through the sauce, and while it pools over the probe.

Rice Extrusion Rig

No curry would be complete without a side of rice. Basmati is traditional in Indian cuisine, which is fluffy and made up of long grains. The Rice Extrusion Rig conforms with standard testing specifications and helps to overcome the issues of lengthy, labour-intensive sensory tests for the measurement of rice firmness. 

Growers, processors and food manufacturers can use it to objectively and accurately analyse the resistance to extrusion of rice samples, enabling them to select the cultivars which satisfy both their own textural requirements and the demands of customers and consumers.

Acoustic Envelope Detector

A very popular Indian side dish is the onion bhaji. This must be crispy, not soggy or flaccid, and so the cutting through using a blade should provide interesting force peaks. These can be assessed alongside an audio recording of the test using the Acoustic Envelope Detector, which allows each force peak to be measured against the current sound level. As crispiness is such an audible quality, this can be very useful in product development.

A product with more extreme crispiness is the poppadum. A well-cooked poppadum is completely brittle, and should show no yielding when under stress – otherwise, it may be perceived as oily. This property can easily be studied by performing a puncture test using a Ball Probe and the Heavy Duty Platform. A good product will show relatively low breaking forces, but absolutely no plasticity. 

Finally, to round off an Indian meal, kulfi is a very popular dessert. This traditional Indian ice cream is very refreshing, and slightly less creamy than Italian ice cream. However, it should still be soft enough to allow the passage of a spoon when it is moved from the freezer to the customer’s plate. A penetration test using a simple Cylinder Probe on a sample of kulfi that has just been removed from the freezer will give a full analysis of the hardness at each depth, and is a very quick and easy test.

Contact Stable Micro Systems today for more information on test methods for Indian food.

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For more information on how to measure texture, please visit the Texture Analysis Properties section on our website.

The TA.XTplus texture analyser is part of a family of texture analysis instruments and equipment from Stable Micro Systems. An extensive portfolio of specialist attachments is available to measure and analyse the textural properties of a huge range of food products. Our technical experts can also custom design instrument fixtures according to individual specifications.

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