By Sharon Omahen

University of Georgia

Have you ever set out to make the perfect
peanut-butter-and-jelly
sandwich only to have the peanut butter rip the bread apart when
you spread it?

Scientists have found a way to prevent such sandwich mishaps.
They’ve developed a new method that will help manufacturers
perfect the texture of their peanut butter.

“The texture of peanut butter is one of its most important
properties,” said Anna Resurreccion, a food scientist with the
University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental
Sciences.

Spreadable and tasty

“No one wants peanut butter that sticks to their mouth,” she
said. “A spreadable peanut butter that has a very good, peanutty
flavor is something that is desired by most people.”

For years, peanut butter makers have
used a method called texture
profile analysis to tell whether a peanut butter’s texture meets
consumer standards.

“Unfortunately, TPA measurements
don’t correlate with human
judgments of peanut butter,” said Resurreccion. “And humans are,
after all, the ultimate judges of how good a peanut butter is.
There have been very few instrumental tests that can correlate
with human evaluations.”

Resurreccion and her graduate
student, Chow Ming Lee, set out to
change this. In their labs, they created the modified TPA
system, a
way to test the texture that can get measurements food
manufacturers can use.

Machines don’t get tired

The new method doesn’t test peanut butter texture any better
than
humans do. “But machines don’t get tired,” she said. “And people
do.”

Resurreccion says the texture-testing
method will allow
manufacturers to know whether their peanut butter has the
qualities consumers need, like and want.

Half of the peanuts grown in the
United States go into peanut
butter. “You can see how important this test is,” Resurreccion
said.

The UGA research has been published
in the “Journal of Food
Science.” The modified TPA method is now available for food
industry use.

“We hope manufacturers will use the
analysis when they find their
peanut butter doesn’t meet consumer standards,”
Resurreccion
said. “They can run the test and then go back to the drawing
board and modify their product.”