Dried Fruit: How To Test For Texture

Increasingly popular as a nutritious snack food are dried fruit pieces. Each type of fruit will have its own unique texture, depending on how it’s prepared. Banana chips, for example, are usually produced from under-ripe banana slices fried in oil. Dry and crisp in texture, they can be salted, flavored with spices, or sugar coated to give consumers a choice of tastes that have general appeal. What type of test will confirm that the banana chips are cooked correctly and have the crispy crunchy texture that consumers crave?

Texture Analyzers are the preferred laboratory instrument when it comes to testing foods ] for desired properties, such as hardness and crispiness. This device simulates the types of actions that our hands and mouth accomplish when holding, biting into, and chewing a food item. The Analyzer is equipped with specially designed probes that compress or penetrate the sample and measures the amount of force required to accomplish each action. the instrument and an accessory called the Three-Point-Bend fixture which can snap the chip in half. This basic test correlates with customer experience when either breaking the chip by hand or putting it into your mouth to take a bite.