By Cat Holmes
University of Georgia
Troops in the war in Iraq this year had MRE’s (Meals Ready to
Eat) that were vastly improved since the 1991 Gulf War. But
scrambled eggs weren’t part of the equation.
The army stopped buying scrambled-egg MRE’s five years ago
because they tasted so bad, said Romeo Toledo, a food scientist
who’s trying to change all that.
“Eggs have been a major problem for the military,” said Toledo,
whose University of Georgia research team is working with a U.S.
Army grant to bring ready-to-eat eggs back into military
rations.
“The troops want them,” Toledo said. “But the scrambled eggs in
the MRE’s were rubbery, had a strange aftertaste and even
stranger colors, sometimes reddish and sometimes green.”
MRE’s are the self-contained meals soldiers carry in flexible,
tough bags made to withstand everything from rats to nerve gas.
A chemically activated heating pouch that can raise the food
temperature to 100 degrees in 10 minutes is standard issue with
the meals.
“Out of the bigger trays used in field kitchens that feed 20,”
Toledo said, “the army estimates that at least 30 percent of the
eggs end up in the trash.”
The poor flavor came from the heating process and long cooking
times. “The MRE’s were cooked for 45 minutes, and the trays were
processed for two hours,” he said. “The eggs got very rubbery
and often smelled like sulfur (a rotten egg smell).”
To force the eggs down, soldiers doused them with barbeque or
Tabasco sauce.
The cooking time was the first problem the UGA team tackled.
“We increased the cooking temperature to 266 degrees
Fahrenheit,” Toledo said. That’s still below the federally
approved 275-degree limit for the plastic packaging.
“This cut the cooking time of the MRE pouches down to 20 minutes
and the tray cooking time down to 45 minutes,” he said.
Decreasing the cooking time alone made a huge difference, but
not enough. The next problem to tackle was flavor.
The eggs are mixed with water and cooked in the pouch, so the
flavor was similar to a boiled egg, Toledo said. The object was
to make the eggs taste more like they’d been cooked on the stove
instead of in a bag.
To get this taste, Toledo and his team mixed a little liquid
margarine into the egg mix, as if they were scrambling eggs in a
pan.
Then they passed the eggs under a radiant heater, which heats to
an extremely high temperature to brown only the surface while
the rest of the eggs remain liquid. The whole batch is then
blended, poured into pouches, sealed and processed.
“The radiant heater generates a fried flavor,” Toledo said.
Now the research team is tackling the final frontier of the army
egg problem: texture.
“We have to dilute the eggs with water or they get too tough,”
Toledo said. “But when you open the packages, especially the
bigger trays, the eggs are swimming in water.
“We are looking at adding some products like Xanthium gum, but
we need to determine the optimal levels,” he said. “Xanthium gum
is already being used in frozen egg products, but we want to
scale back the amount.”
Toledo and his team have a good taste tester: Jeff Mitchell, a
chief warrant officer in the U.S. Army Veterinary Corps who
begins working on a UGA food science masters degree this fall.
“I tried (the former scrambled-egg MRE’s) in a field exercise
about six years ago,” Mitchell said. “They didn’t taste much
like eggs. They were more brown than yellow and the texture was
strange — thin layers mashed together.”
Mitchell said the new eggs are a huge improvement already. “They
actually taste like eggs,” he said. “They’re pale yellow, you
can see flecks of pepper in them and the texture is much
better.”
(Cat Holmes is a science writer with the University of Georgia
College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.)
