science

Nutraceutical Food Scientist vs ChatGPT Gummies – Part 1

April 4, 2023 by Alan McClure

You may have already considered turning to ChatGPT to find new functional food recipes.

If you’ve played around with it and you have any experience with making functional food products such as gummies, you may have noticed some chinks in the armor.

The first and last thing to remember about this program is that it is not sentient. It uses machine learning to sort through everything it can access on the internet–2021 and earlier– and pull an answer that its training says best fits your question.

First I asked ChatGPT 3.5 how to make the best vegan gummy.

It’s a simple, basic question that anyone searching for a gummy recipe might ask, whether it will stand alone, serve a functional role, or even be a medicinal cannabis edible.

I wanted a recipe that doesn’t use any animal-derived ingredient (i.e., no gelatin). I was expecting that ChatGPTwould probably suggest something fruit-flavored because that’s so common in the gummy world.

As far as plant-derived gelling agents go, I know from experience that the three most common are pectin, agar, and starch. For homemade gummies, starch is rarely the choice, as the specialized-for-confectionery modified starches are hard to acquire, and standard starches, like corn starch, doesn’t serve the role as well.

I also thought that if ChatGPT really understood “best” it would offer something with pectin, given the well-known excellent organoleptic characteristics that result from its use.

But this is what it came up with:

Here’s a recipe for making vegan gummies:
Ingredients:
1/2 cup of fruit juice (preferably low pH like lemon juice or orange juice)
1/4 cup of water
1 tablespoon of agar agar powder (a vegan alternative to gelatin)
1/2 teaspoon of citric acid
1/4 teaspoon of salt
Optional: functional ingredient
Equipment:
Silicone gummy molds
Saucepan
Whisk
Dropper or syringe
Instructions:
In a saucepan, mix together the fruit juice, water, agar agar powder, citric acid, and salt.
Whisk the mixture together over low heat until the agar agar powder dissolves completely.
Add the optional functional ingredient.
Remove the saucepan from the heat and let it cool for a few minutes.
Using a dropper or syringe, fill the silicone gummy molds with the mixture.
Place the molds in the refrigerator for 30-60 minutes to let the gummies set.
Once the gummies have set, remove them from the molds and store them in an airtight container in the refrigerator.
That’s it! This recipe should yield about 20-30 gummies, depending on the size of your molds. Make sure to label your gummies and keep them out of reach of children or pets
ChatGPT 3.5

Don’t use this ChatGPT gummy recipe!

TLDR: It will turn out sour and may not even gel.

Let me break down what went wrong, and then I’ll ask it a more specific question.

Precision measuring

Generally speaking, it’s better to measure by mass/weight than by volume. Ingredients tend to vary in density from producer to producer. For example ¼ tsp. salt will have a different mass of salt depending on the grain/flake shape and size. Which can change the flavor drastically, especially when you scale up for market (which you can’t realistically do volumetrically with dry ingredients).

It’s not surprising that ChatGPT pulled a gummy recipe with volume-based measurement. It’s just drawing from what’s available on the internet—which leans toward American preferences, and American households still don’t often have scales in their kitchens. But if you’re making gummies commercially, definitely measure your recipe by weight.

Flavor

It makes sense to see fruit as the basis of this recipe. Fruit juices and purees are common gummy ingredients.

But I am surprised to see it suggest a low pH (high acid) juice like lemon, especially since citric acid (which makes lemon sour) is also included.

People generally prefer their fruit-flavored gummies to be sweet—and there is essentially no sugar in this recipe, especially if you go with lemon juice. But even orange, pineapple, or some other juice would skew toward the sour side…and without adding additional sugar to balance it, I suspect these gummies would taste quite harsh.

Okay but let’s say you’re averse to sugar, or you just like things super sour—there’s still the fact that many functional ingredients are inherently bitter.

As any chef or food scientist knows, bitterness is enhanced by acid and mitigated by sweetness. So a recipe this sour would potentially be unpalatably bitter, without adding ingredients to manage bitterness.

And if we’re talking about flavor, we can’t just talk about sour, bitter, and sweet.

We also have to consider one of the biggest flavor factors in any recipe: aroma! It can’t just be an afterthought.

You have to consider all the ingredients that add aroma to the recipe, and in the case of the ChatGPT one above, there isn’t much. Various extracts from fruit or spices are commonly used to add flavor to cooked confectionery such as gummies. Without them, you can end up with a very boring product. Cooking down lemon or orange juice, for example, results in a kind of “canned” washed-out flavor, and it’s not a good look. But imagine the essence of the zest of a lemon or orange rind, or excellent bourbon vanilla extract. Such ingredients can be used to great effect.

Using agar for gummies

Why did ChatGPT choose agar as a baseline for the gummies? It’s impossible to know for sure, but my guess is that more people use agar because it’s easier to work with and doesn’t require a specific pH range and sugar concentration in order to gel.

Pectin is, for lack of a better word, more difficult.

And if you Google “vegan agar gummy” versus “vegan pectin gummy” you’ll notice there are almost 25% more instances of agar.

Of course more doesn’t mean better. But ChatGPT has no way of knowing that. It has no mouth, taste buds, or experience-based understanding of flavor or mouthfeel.

Also, agar is known for having lots of variability in its gelling capacity, which is apparently based upon regional differences in chemical composition. This means sometimes even batch to batch variation of agar from the same manufacturer might cause noticeable texture differences.

Another major consideration is that agar needs to be heated to dissolve in water—but when acid is also involved, the agar begins to break down; which dramatically reduces its gelling capacity.

In other words step one—which calls for mixing the lemon juice, citric acid, and agar before heating—is not advised.

To do it right you would first cook agar in a sugar solution to a particular temperature or brix, and then cool it down to below 200° F before blending with acidic ingredients.

Because of agar’s flexibility, ChatGPT’s gummy recipe might work—but it would then be using significantly more agar than necessary, and therefore your cost of goods increases for no reason other than following ChatGPT’s wasteful practices.

Home gummy makers may not care, but business owners generally want to avoid wasting one of their more expensive gummy ingredients—when a slight change in process could solve the problem instead.

Remember, every inefficiency or extra cost magnifies significantly when you scale for manufacturing. And by then it’s too late…

Fortunately food science is here to rescue you from that sunk-cost fate.

Shelf life

Remember that absence of sugar and the short cooking time? That adds up to a real short shelf-life, which is related to water activity.

Sugar and salt dampen that activity (so to speak). Without them, even low pH foods can grow mold. Disgusting, yes—but some molds also produce toxins. Which can bring legal trouble on top of the guaranteed ick factor that’ll sink your brand. Can you imagine the Google reviews…?

Unless you want to trust vendors to keep your product refrigerated at all times, you definitely wouldn’t want to use this recipe for commercial purposes.

Always always always run any newly developed products through shelf-life testing. (Ask me how)

How to get a decent gummy recipe from ChatGPT

ChatGPT’s strengths are also its weaknesses. All it does is pull from what already exists online. It’s not actually creating anything truly new. It can’t determine what will work versus what will fall flat and why. It has no sense—it’s just a masterful indexer and data analyzer.

Laying aside its lack of sensory input and actual experience to focus on what does make it a useful tool—one perpetual problem with the program still is that it’s hard to know what you don’t know. Both for the AI itself and for the humans trying to train it to give useful responses.

For example, how could ChatGPT reasonably know that pectin is preferable over agar for its superior flavor release, or that pectin has a more familiar mouthfeel for westerners? We would likely have to force it to consider these issues in our original question, and to do that, we’d have to realize that they are potential problems in the first place, and unless you are a confectionery expert or food scientist, that would be very unlikely information for you to have.

That said, if ChatGPT were trained to take into account issues like flavor release, mouthfeel, flavor profiles, and so forth, it may be able to self-correct. Each new version of ChatGPT leaps closer and closer to truly useful and not just entertaining.

But in the meantime, just remember that better questions can produce better results. (Hey—just like in science!)

So this time I asked ChatGPT:

How to make the best vegan gummy using pectin & granulated sugar, a recipe that will result in gummies that actually set, with a good mouthfeel and flavor. Listing ingredients in metric weights.

And here’s what it came up with:

Ingredients:
250 ml fruit juice of your choice
10 g pectin
200 g granulated sugar
2 g citric acid
2 g vanilla extract
Optional: functional ingredient
Instructions:
In a small saucepan, combine the fruit juice and pectin. Whisk until the pectin is fully dissolved.
Add the sugar to the juice mixture and stir until it’s fully dissolved.
Heat the mixture over low heat and add the citric acid and vanilla extract. Stir well.
Continue heating the mixture over low heat, stirring occasionally, until it reaches 107°C. Use a candy thermometer to measure the temperature.
Remove the mixture from the heat and let it cool for a few minutes.
Add the optional functional ingredient and stir well.
Pour the mixture into a silicone gummy mold, filling each mold about 3/4 full.
Refrigerate the molds for at least an hour or until the gummies are firm.
Remove the gummies from the mold and store them in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to two weeks.
Be sure to label your gummies clearly and keep them out of reach of children and pets.
ChatGPT 3.5

This recipe looks somewhat better—but even at a glance I can tally up several issues that would prevent this from ever exceeding mediocre.

It did get rid of the extra water, which bodes well for shelf life. It also added a thermometer to the process, which is imperative when using pectin (though its heat/time ratio is a problem). And the flavor balance seems much more palatable, with vanilla added for more pronounced flavor.

But again, this recipe is still rife with problems. It would never work as a product for any reputable functional food business. And depending upon the pH of the fruit you choose, it might not even gel, though with the significant amount of pectin called for, it might also gel very firmly.

Read how I solve these problems (and more) in the next chapter of Food Scientist vs ChatGPT – in which I work with a client to develop this gummy recipe into a delicious, high-quality, long-lasting, and viable product for the nutraceutical gummy market.

Follow our LinkedIn for updates & the next installment!

How to Make Better Functional Chocolate with Food Science

November 9, 2022 by Alan McClure

Have you noticed that nearly all the functional chocolates available these days range from waxy and cloying, to mediocre and just barely tolerable?

Trust me, I’m a scientist—I’ve carried out careful sensory evaluation on a significant sample size of the functional chocolates. The results have been…disappointing. But I’m still hopeful. Why?

Because it means there’s a huge opportunity for a functional foods company (like yours) to corner the market niche of high-quality functional chocolate.

Until that happens though, we’re all consigned to gulping down “chocolates” that taste like muddy, bittersweet medicine. Gross.

At least each dose is small enough to take down in a bite or two…

But what if I told you that functional chocolate can be as fantastically flavored and gourmet as anything you’d find in a San Francisco Whole Foods or from a multi-generation French chocolate maker?

It just takes a little focused food science and finesse.

How to use functional ingredients in chocolates

I’m glad you asked. Whether you are trying to incorporate CBD, melatonin, or a newly available functional ingredient into your chocolate—high quality functional ingredients should be your starting point for making functional chocolate, not an afterthought.

Most functional chocolate producers add their functional ingredients almost as an afterthought. It’s just there to pack a punch and deliver a dose. So they can boast some fantastic milligram total on the packaging, and shove mediocre products down our greedy throats.

But don’t our greedy tongues deserve to be in on the experience too? Shouldn’t the chocolates we eat TASTE as good as they are a benefit to our health?

If you agree, here’s the start of an answer:

Think of your functional ingredient as a flavor ingredient. Not just a magic or medicinal one.

If it has clear aroma, bitter, or astringent notes, for example, these should be considered as components of the product from the ground up, not at the final moment.

What’s the best functional ingredient for chocolate?

First and foremost, invest in high-quality ingredients that have minimal off-flavors, if possible. In poorly purified ingredients there can be an array of unpleasant flavors. This is particularly common in the growing edibles industry.

But this is usually avoidable, because there are often a number of functional ingredient producers/vendors representing a range of qualities from cheap and dirty tasting, to clean and virtually without aroma, even if bitterness still needs to be dealt with.

Because don’t your customers deserve better?

So why would you use anything other than high-quality ingredients in functional chocolates?

How to make high-quality functional chocolate?

Be thoughtful about every ingredient!

Making top quality chocolate always revolves around at least three main taste elements: sweet, bitter, and sour. Not to mention aroma and other sensory characteristics like astringency.

Cocoa is naturally bitter, and so are many functional ingredients. To compensate for the bitterness of functional ingredients, many brands will simply drop the cocoa percentage and drive up the sugar. But all of that sweetness also drives out the complexity.

There are many ways to mask, balance, and/or incorporate bitterness in functional foods, such as CBD-containing edibles, but remember—every adjustment you make in a chocolate recipe has a ripple effect.

Choosing ingredients that enhance existing flavors while naturally balancing those that tend to be more unpleasant, can go a long way toward creating top-quality functional chocolate to enchant the market. There are many ingredients we can use with this seemingly magical ability. If you’re wondering, one such great example is sea salt. It packs a huge punch when it comes to enhancing flavor of virtually any product.

Also, remember…

You don’t need to go bean-to-bar for gourmet functional chocolate

As a functional chocolate producer, you’re better off as a chocolatier rather than a chocolate maker. Going all the way back to the bean adds little to your goals and process except extra steps and stress.

Chocolate maker is someone who makes chocolate from scratch, using different percentages of cacao (cocoa beans that need to be sourced, roasted, and further processed) and other ingredients.

Chocolatier sources finished chocolate from a chocolate maker, and adds ingredients and flavors to create their own bar or confection.

You should certainly source one or more high-quality chocolates that will pair well with the flavor and aroma profile of whichever functional ingredient(s) you choose. And another thing…

Don’t try to cram maximum functional ingredients into every bite

Not only does that let your customer enjoy a few more bites of your delicious chocolate per dose, but decreasing the density of functional ingredient also automatically decreases the bitterness you have to deal with.

This can work on a marketing level too. Who sells more bars? The brand with 10 doses per bar, or the one that is super delicious and mouthwatering, costs less, and sacrifices only a few doses?

Summary: How does food science lead to better functional chocolate?

When it comes to formulating the best functional chocolate for the market, there are a lot of elements to consider.

Functional ingredients vendors
Format of the functional ingredients (oils, powders, etc.)
Dosage
Cocoa percentage
Mouthfeel
Appearance
Sweet, sour, bitter balance
Overall flavor bouquet

As a food scientist with a PhD in flavor chemistry, when it comes to functional chocolate formulation, one of my most important and unique tools is formal experimental-design. I have the software, lab experience, and deep knowledge of taste and flavor on a molecular level that you can’t get anywhere else.

And by the way, before becoming a functional food science consultant, I was for many years an award-winning chocolate maker and confectioner, with additional experience in formulation of bakery items, ice cream, beverages, and more.

Any worthwhile chocolate consultant could hopefully help you source a decent chocolate; but only food science can help you pinpoint the best possible version, based on multi-variable experiment setup, multi-objective optimization, and formal sensory analysis (including consumer testing, if you have the budget and time).

So what it comes down to fundamentally is this: What are you trying to achieve?

Are you trying to make excellent-quality functional chocolate that loyal customers will buy over and over again because it’s so delicious?

Or are you just trying to get a bunch of one-time sales?

If you answered Yes to the first question, reach out and let’s formulate some gourmet functional chocolate at a quality level that still rarely exists in the functional foods market.

MORE: Want to see more about how functional chocolate formulation works? Follow us on LinkedIn!

Product Formulation Optimization #3

October 19, 2021 by Alan McClure

The Troublesome Yet Terrific Tortilla (Part 3)

In part 3 of our look at the troublesome yet terrific tortilla, following as it does from a general description of the tortilla quandary in part 1, and some specific details regarding the tortilla challenges anticipated in part 2, finally I’ll begin to explain how I approached the task of optimizing the formulation, or in simple terms, how I made the very best tortilla.

What Is “Best?”

As mentioned previously, I’ve already defined that I am speaking of wheat-flour-based tortillas; so my goal in optimizing a tortilla formulation is to produce the wheat-flour-based tortilla with the best organoleptic characteristics. It’s worth taking a moment to consider what I mean by “best.” In this case, I am considering only my own preferences, whether I’m talking about aroma, overall flavor, mouthfeel, or even appearance. However, if I were developing this tortilla for a regional restaurant chain, it would make sense to do consumer evaluation that includes a sample of the regular customers of that chain, and perhaps also consumers that the chain is trying to convert to customers. My specific preferences, for example, may or may not overlap well with those of the restaurant customers. But luckily, since the tortillas in question are for me, I can more simply consider my own preferences.

All Wheat-Flour Tortillas Are Not Created Equal.

Also, it is important for me to clarify that I want a tortilla that tastes great when fresh. I’m not at all concerned about storing the finished product on the shelf, or in the fridge or freezer. I want a tortilla that I can griddle now, eat, enjoy thoroughly, and then move on. If I were developing a tortilla for a grocery chain, I would have to reconsider this approach, because in that case the end consumer has little chance of buying the tortillas fresh and hot. They will need to be reheated out of necessity, and they will likely need to be able to remain free of mold for at least a week on the shelves, and perhaps longer. Such a tortilla would have characteristics that are dramatically different from the type I want to eat for my own enjoyment.

Are there Additional Constraints?

There are plenty of other details to consider. Do I want to work with ingredients available at the local grocery? Am I interested milling grain into flour? Does the tortilla need to be vegetarian? What types of equipment are available for processing and cooking the tortillas? And speaking of production constraints, while I’m willing to deal with dough that is a bit sticky or stiff and difficult to roll out in order to achieve a better tortilla, there is a limit to my patience. I don’t want to make my life 50% more difficult just to squeak in an extra 1% increase in improved mouthfeel. So, as I’m rating the various sensory characteristics of each tortilla, I can also consider rating things like dough stickiness, dough toughness, and perhaps overall workability.

Pulling Everything Together.

I’ve said that I want to optimize the formulation for a wheat-flour-based tortilla that is best according to my own preferences. I want to be able to make it at home with a 4’x4′ maple butcher block serving as the work surface, a wooden rolling pin, a 6-qt stand mixer, an induction range, a cast-iron skillet, and a spatula. I would also generally like to use ingredients that are readily available (e.g., King Arthur AP wheat flour, sea salt, and filtered tap water), but I’m willing to put in a little extra work to improve the quality of the added fat.

Ingredients.

For the fat in the tortillas, I’ll render my own lard from the backfat of locally raised hogs. As part of the rendering process, I’ll use a temperature high enough to brown the cracklings once they are void of fat, which adds additional roasted complexity to the lard’s flavor profile. At the end of the rendering process, I’ll also add some smoked bacon to give the lard a subtle smoky note. I will not be using plant-based oils in this recipe, as I know from experience that they have bland or off flavors in tortillas. I will also not be using baking powder. As mentioned in part 2, baking powder is quite a common ingredient in modern tortillas, but I would prefer to depend upon steam–from the added water–to leaven and lighten the texture of the tortillas. In my experience, the mouthfeel of the end product is better than when baking powder is used. So now I’ve clearly defined the constraints for this project. What’s next?

**Freshly griddled wheat-flour tortillas made with freshly rendered pork lard, filtered water, and sea salt**

A Product Optimization Experiment.

We now have to take our known constraints and design an experiment that will allow us to optimize the tortilla formulation. How should we proceed? One variable at a time? Often seen as the acronym OVAT, this is thought by most non-scientists to describe how experiments are run according to the scientific method. Actually, even some scientists believe this. But here’s the thing, it’s dead wrong. Even in a relatively simple food like our tortillas with only four ingredients (i.e., flour, water, lard, salt), changing the amount of one variable at a time, let’s say the flour, while holding all else constant, is likely to be, at best, an incredibly inefficient way to determine what the optimal tortilla recipe is, and at worst, will never find it at all. In short, OVAT has significant disadvantages. Arguably, the most important disadvantage is that important “interactions” usually exist in foods, and will be missed with the OVAT approach.

Interactions!

In this project, if we simplify for a moment to say that our only goal is to improve the flavor of the tortilla on a scale from 1-10, then any positive main effect would be one related to any of the individual ingredients that increases quality. For example, maybe more lard increases quality on average. That’s lard’s main effect. But what happens when water and lard are both present? Does water, in addition to having its own main effect on quality also impact the degree to which lard has a positive impact? If so, then that would be an interaction effect. It might be the case that with smaller amounts of water, lard is hugely positive in its impact, but with more water it makes a much smaller positive difference. It is immediately clear why interactions can cause huge problems with the OVAT approach; because if you only change one variable/ingredient at a time, you can’t determine if interactions exist. And guess what? Interactions almost always exist to some degree, and sometimes they are hugely influential. So what can we do about this?

Optimal Design of Experiments.

When the OVAT approach can’t be trusted to work, which is usually, instead we can rely on the considerable theory in the field of statistics that supports what is called “design of experiments,” along with modern computers and software, to produce an optimal experimental design. Such a design is able to help determine what the optimal formulation would be of a tortilla, again from the flavor quality standpoint defined above, but more than that, such a design even allows the experienced product development expert to determine the optimal formulation while considering several characteristics at the same time. This is sometimes called multiple objective optimization. How it does this is easier to show with an example than to explain in prose, so we’ll take a look at a tortilla-development optimal design in the final part of this series (part 4).

–Alan McClure

Product Formulation Optimization #2

September 28, 2021 by Alan McClure

The Troublesome Yet Terrific Tortilla (Part 2)

Continuing on with the product formulation optimization theme, using tortilla formulation specifically as an example, we dig in further. As a reminder, tortilla formulation is more complicated than it may at first appear. As I wrote previously:

“From the standpoint of the uninitiated, a tortilla seems a simple beast. As a plain product on its own there are no fillings or inclusions, no added flavors, swirls of color, or fancy shapes. Even the plastic bags in which they’re sold ten at a time are nothing special. But the phrase “deceptively simple” does exist for a reason. And one could reasonably argue that it was coined as a product formulation expert was doing some deep thinking about the common, yet commonly unimpressive, tortilla.”

In this recent post I also spoke about the two different types of tortillas (corn and wheat flour), and noted some of the complexities of both of them including nixtamalization in the case of corn tortillas, and the presence of gluten and necessary added fat in the case of the wheat flour tortillas. Clearly, when done well, both types of tortillas are fantastic, but my family was handed down a wheat flour tortilla tradition from my Mexican great grandmother Guadalupe Otila Macias, and since I was a wee child I’ve been truly mesmerized by this type.

Watching my grandmother mix and knead them by hand, roll them out with a flick or two of the wrist, and then bake them on top of a cast-iron griddle on the stove–the incredible smell–and then passing one steaming and blistered with flavor from hand to hand with nearly burnt fingertips, taking bites and smiling uncontrollably. These are some of the most powerful memories of my childhood. Why would I ever want to change a single detail in my original family recipe?

As I mentioned previously, wheat flour tortillas can be tricky because the gluten proteins in wheat (i.e., glutenin and gliadin) when hydrated, help to create a stretchy and springy dough that is notoriously hard to roll out. To produce a less tough and easier to roll tortilla, people traditionally added some amount of fat to the dough in the form of freshly rendered pork lard. The added lard reduces the overall gluten development, and the tortillas become more aromatic and the mouthfeel more tender and less chewy. And when everything is just right, the tortillas puff magically like perfect little pillows, making them even lighter in texture. But what about when everything isn’t just right?

tortillas freshly cooked — **Freshly griddled wheat-flour tortillas made with freshly rendered pork lard, filtered water, and sea salt**

The Baking Powder Bandage

The problem is that getting the ratio of ingredients just right can be very tricky. If it is even a bit off, or the griddle temperature is not optimal, or the tortilla maker is just not paying the right amount of attention, the tortillas can end up dense and unpleasant. The solution to this problem used by most is an addition of baking powder. It allows the tortilla maker a bit more flexibility in all of the important conditions. However, the texture of a baking-powder-risen tortilla is not quite the same as one without, and it has been written more than once by tortilla aficionados that the baking powder version is simply not as good.

The Vegetable Oil Blunder

Another problem is that as refined plant-based vegetable oils have become much cheaper, and good fatback from which to make lard has become less readily available in the marketplace, recipes have begun to call for either liquid oil or hydrogenated oil, also called shortening. These oil-based tortillas simply aren’t capable of tasting as good as those made from the roasted and rendered fat of flavorful hogs.

So, the modern homemade wheat-flour tortilla, which itself is scarce compared to the store-bought versions with little personality, is itself a shadow of its former glorious self. But if these changes to the modern tortilla have led to a poverty of quality, what is to be done about it? How can we possibly attempt to recreate a product formulation that most of us have never tasted?

I’ll explain how I approached this challenge in an effort to do just that. Stay tuned for más detalles in Part 3.

–Alan McClure

Product Formulation Optimization #1

September 15, 2021 by Alan McClure

The Troublesome Yet Terrific Tortilla (Part 1)

From the standpoint of the uninitiated, a tortilla seems a simple beast. As a plain product on its own there are no fillings or inclusions, no added flavors, swirls of color, or fancy shapes. Even the plastic bags in which they’re sold ten at a time are nothing special. But the phrase “deceptively simple” does exist for a reason. And one could reasonably argue that it was coined as a product formulation expert was doing some deep thinking about the common, yet commonly unimpressive, tortilla.

So where should we start to understand the product formulation challenge better? It’s often the case that the very best examples of foods are traditional ones. And certainly where tortillas are concerned, traditional versions are far better than the most familiar brands at the local grocer. For those who have had incredible tortillas, the kind that are calling out to be eaten, simply, steaming hot from the Mexican comal, fingers burning, we know this in our gut. But if one wants this beautiful experience far away from a Mexican market or abuela, is it even possible?

What is a tortilla anyway?

First, let’s simplify the issue. Tortillas come in two main types: corn- and wheat-flour-based. Corn tortillas are traditionally made from alkali-treated heirloom corn, called “nixtamal,” a Nahuatl term borrowed from the Aztec. This process, often referred to as nixtamalization, uses a relatively dilute solution of culinary lime, aka calcium hydroxide, in water to catalyze hydrolysis and conversion of various compounds in the corn kernels’ hull. This process makes the corn easier to digest, more nutritious, less likely to contain harmful mycotoxins, and most people would claim, myself included, more delicious. In fact, the flavor is so good, that traditional corn tortillas require nothing more than ground nixtamal, water, and bit of salt, to create a fabulous flat food fit for an Aztec king. But, as previously mentioned…

Corn is not the only way…

In northern Mexico and Texas, which also used to be part of Mexico, where wheat flour was more readily available, tortillas made from this grain were more common. And because the proteins in wheat, when hydrated, help to create a stretchy and springy dough that is notoriously hard to roll out, people added some amount of fat to the dough in the form of freshly rendered pork lard. The lard reduced the overall gluten development, making the thin disks of dough easier to roll out, and moreover, made the tortillas more aromatic and the mouthfeel more tender than chewy. And when the proportions of flour:water:lard are just right, the tortillas puff magically, making them lighter and more tender in texture, and giving the surface of the tortilla a deliciously mottled appearance, due to light charring of the steam-puffed pockets on the surface, thereby creating even more flavor–Maillard reaction pathways y’all.

Now, I’m a sucker for both types of tortilla, and I’ve made countless batches of both, nixtamalizing my own corn, experimenting with many of the countless heirloom Mexican varieties, and for the wheat tortillas, rendering my own lard, getting the roasted, almost smoky pork flavor just right. But I have to admit that having grown up with wheat flour tortillas in my family, a cultural contribution of my Mexican maternal great-grandmother, Guadalupe Otila Macias, who emigrated to Texas as a young girl, I have spent considerably more time thinking about, making, and certainly eating wonderful wheat flour tortillas. And I can assure you that even with four ingredients, they are tricky to perfect, or more technically, to optimize the product formulation.

But I’ll tell you what; recently I did just that. Stay tuned for más detalles in Part 2.

–Alan McClure

Good, Better, Best?

August 7, 2021 by Alan McClure

Sage advice from the product developer:

How good is good enough? Is it just fine to be as good as the competition, or does a product always need to be even better to compete? And what if better isn’t even good enough? Developing award-winning products that utterly destroy the competition means aiming for the best possible version of a product. With all of the choice in the marketplace these days, it’s the only reasonable approach to ensure sales superiority and passion for the product on the part of consumers, tastemakers, and influencers. But how does one achieve the very best?

The little-known hard truth is that creativity, inspiration, passion and dedication simply aren’t enough. Every single product has an infinite number of possible iterations. Tweaking one ingredient at a time based on experience may give you a better product than the one before, but is it actually the very best? Without following well constructed optimally designed product development experiments, the answer is almost certainly “No.” Luckily for us, such experiments make the product development process more precise and more efficient, saving time and money while producing not just a better product, but the very best!

-Alan McClure