Soft matter physics meets the culinary arts: from polymers to jellyfish

Publication date: Available online 5 February 2019Source: International Journal of Gastronomy and Food ScienceAuthor(s): Mie Thorborg Pedersen, Thomas A. VilgisAbstractThis paper revisits the preparation of jellyfish as food from a soft matter physics point of view. Jellyfish is an example of a “living gel”, which can be transformed into edible matter with textures different from any other food matter. In contrast to most food, jellyfish cannot be cooked in the simple sense by increasing the temperature or classical preservation using combinations of table salt, sugar and acids, as these procedures result in a complete disintegration of the jellyfish. Instead, when jellyfish is prepared as food, the gel first needs to undergo a number of physical transformations in order to keep its structural integrity. In this paper, we specify two fundamentally different ways of preparing jellyfish. Firstly, the traditional Asian method, which involves adding a mixture of non-trivial salts giving jellyfish a crunchy texture. Then, a novel method recently invented where jellyfish are immersed in ethanol inducing a partial gel collapse, which later enables creating a crispy texture via a glass transition. Interestingly, both “cooking” methods rely on specific changes of the physical properties of the jellyfish gel. To explain this, we introduce soft matter physics and polymer science and give insights to the molecular origin of the jellyfish gel and discuss the scientific concepts of...

Source: International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science - February 5, 2019 Category: Food Science Source Type: research