Issue 10, 2016

Celebrating Soft Matter's 10th Anniversary: Simplicity in complexity – towards a soft matter physics of caramel

Abstract

Caramel is a mixture of sugars, milk proteins, fat and water cooked at high temperatures to initiate Maillard reactions. We study caramels as ‘active emulsion-filled protein gels’, in which fat droplets are chemically-bonded to a background gel matrix of cross-linked proteins in a concentrated aqueous sugar solution. We delimit a ‘caramel region’ in composition space. Oscillatory rheology within this region reveals that we can superpose the mechanical spectra of our caramels onto a single pair of G′(ω), G′′(ω) master curves using time–composition superposition (tCS) over 12 decades of frequency, so that these caramels are instances of an underlying ‘universal material’. This insight constrains the molecular mechanisms for structure formation, and implies that measuring a couple of parameters will suffice to predict the rheology of our caramels over 12 orders of magnitude in frequency.

Graphical abstract: Celebrating Soft Matter's 10th Anniversary: Simplicity in complexity – towards a soft matter physics of caramel

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
21 Jul 2015
Accepted
22 Jan 2016
First published
22 Jan 2016
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY license

Soft Matter, 2016,12, 2757-2765

Author version available

Celebrating Soft Matter's 10th Anniversary: Simplicity in complexity – towards a soft matter physics of caramel

S. Weir, K. M. Bromley, A. Lips and W. C. K. Poon, Soft Matter, 2016, 12, 2757 DOI: 10.1039/C5SM01797A

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications without requesting further permissions from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given.

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