how-o-how do you quantify sweetness?

[zskillz]

the other day I was at breakfast at perkins and I was reading a sweet-n-low package. It says something to the effect of "tastes as sweet as 3 packets of sugar". That may not be exactly correct, but it was along those lines.

now here's the deal... I don't really understand how you can quantify "sweet taste".

what do you all think?


-Z

[Warthog]

Subjective?

dunno

[Gomer]

Everything like that can be quantified... There are some people in the program I was in who are food processing engineers. They prolly know. My guess is that they used a sensory panel or something along those lines to determine it.

I was in a few panels while at school here... mostly for ice cream. Lots of fun. You go into a little room and you have a card green and red. You slide the green end of the card under a little door in front of you at the table. Window pops open and out comes a tray of icecream (10 or so little samples) and a grade sheet, window closes. You taste one, grade it, take a sip of water, test the next one etc until you are done... then you put the red end under the little door. It opens up, they snatch the leftovers and the grade sheet, close it... then it opens again real quick and they give you stuff. Some times it is post it notes and a highlighter, sometimes it is a coupon for a free icecream cone from the dairy store... it was always pretty neat tho.

[OuTpaTienT]

The Mechanistic Understanding of the Sweetness Response

and

Theory of Sweetness

[Theophylact]

I assume you do it the same way you measure bitterness, or hotness (of peppers): you make up standard solutions, and dilute them successively until the effect can't be perceived. So with a jalapeño, it takes only a dilution of about 5000 times until you can't detect it, but with a habañero, it's 100,000 to 300,000 times. Your typical habañero would then have a hotness of 200,000 scovilles (the official unit). I don't know what the unit of sweetness is.