Author: Peter Török

First paper on Food Research has been submitted

Yesterday we submitted our first paper on food research to Journal of Food Engineering entitled “Tenderising effect of sodium bicarbonate on pork loin”. The paper is based on the work Xiao Liu Chu has done on comparing the effect of sodium bicarbonate with sodium chloride solution (brine). The authors are XL Chu, P. Török, C. Paterson, Tom Aikens. Here is the abstract of the paper:

“We investigated the effect of a 3% concentration solution of sodium bicarbonate (treatment A) and pure sodium bicarbonate (treatment B) on pork loin samples. These were compared to a 5% salt brine (treatment C), controls consisting of tap water (treatment D), and untreated samples (treatment E).

Discussions with Dr Baranyi at the Institute of Food Research

I have visited Dr József Baranyi, leader of the Computational Microbiology Research Group at BBSRC’s Institute of Food Research to discuss possible collaboration on predictive microbiology. We have strong interests in developing reliable ways of constructing models for non-isothermal predictive microbiology. Currently population level modelling is based on first order kinetics for both growth and inactivation. This model however, is only applicable on a very limited and constant temperature range. Both professional and home cooking, on the other hand, take raw food ingredients through rather complicated heat cycles which in turn violate the validity conditions of the model. We have two fourth year undergraduate students, Sergey Goryunov and Vedish Bhatoolaul, working on this project.