Note-by-Note Cooking: The Future of Food

Author:Hervé This, Malcolm DeBevoise
Format: epub
Tags: CKB041000, Cooking/History, TEC012000, Technology & Engineering/Food Science
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC
Published: 2014-10-06T16:00:00+00:00

COMPLEX SUGARS

Simple sugars such as glucose, galactose, and fructose are technically known as monosaccharides. Sucrose, a disaccharide formed by linking two monosaccharides together, is somewhat more complex. Linking three monosaccharides together gives you trisaccharides, linking four together gives you tetrasaccharides, linking five together gives you pentasaccharides, and so on. Onions contain fructooligosaccharides, in which one glucose molecule is linked to several fructose molecules. Inulin, found in chicory, is also an oligosaccharide.

Once the number of monosaccharide units exceeds ten, we arrive at the complex sugars, polysaccharides. Although polysaccharides generally are tasteless, they are useful in creating consistency, as we saw not only in the case of cellulose, but also of amylose and amylopectin, found in starches; of chitosan, produced from chitin; of various compounds extracted from algae; and of gums, to name only a few. As I say, these compounds typically have no taste except when small amounts of sugar are released in the mouth. Salivary amylases, for example, are proteins that function as enzymes, cutting up long chains of amylose and amylopectin in flour, with the result that after a few seconds a sweet taste appears—enough of one, at any rate, to allow an inventive cook to achieve novel effects.

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