Who hasn’t at some point been chewing on an almond and tasted an unpleasant and unexpected aftertaste that has nothing to do with the taste we are used to from one of the most consumed nuts in the world?
The culprit has a name: amygdalin, a diglucoside that, when in contact with enzymes present in saliva, breaks down into glucose, benzaldehyde (the cause of the bitter taste) and hydrogen cyanide.
To reduce this unpleasant ‘surprise’, the Farming Systems Engineering (AGR-128) and Food Technology (AGR-193) research groups at the University of Cordoba’s School of Agricultural and Forestry Engineering, with collaboration from the Andalusian Institute of Agricultural Research and Training’s Alameda del Obispo Center, developed method that can predict levels of the abovementioned amygdalin present in the nuts analyzed both with and without shells, as well as correctly classify sweet almonds and bitter ones on an industrial scale, something that has only been done with shelled nuts, individual kernels or ground nuts to date. [Read more…] about New technology to detect bitter almonds in real time
Related Posts
- 41Consumers always look for good quality products, above all in fresh food like vegetables. But how do we measure the quality of fresh spinach before it gets on the market nowadays? The most commonly used methods to analyze vegetable quality are slow, costly and destructive. They require choosing several samples…