Week 3

This week, we learned about carbohydrate. In this chapter, we looked into carbohydrates and concentrated specifically on sugar and their functions in food. 

Carbohydrate can be devided into 2 categories which are saccharides and polysaccharides.  Saccharides or sugar can be divided into 2 categories which are monosaccharides and disaccharides. 

Monosaccharides is the simplest unit of carbohydrates, whereas disaccharides are 2 units of monosaccharides that are joined by glycosidic bond. 

While polisaccharides are complex sugars made from multiple sugar molecule units that are joined by glycosidic bond.

Functions of sugar include:

Although the main reason for the use of sugar is its sweet taste, sugar has many other functions in food technology. The most important among these are that added sugar in foods acts as a sweetener, preservative, texture modifier, fermentation substrate, flavouring and colouring agent, bulking agent. The various methods of use of sugar are based on its physical and chemical properties. The replacement of sugar by the newly available sweeteners is difficult if the sweetness values or physical and chemical properties of the substitutes differ greatly from those of sucrose.

Week 2

The class was postponed to wednesday since 31th august was a public holiday. I hope its not too late for me to wish Happy Merdeka Day to all Malaysian..:)

During this class, I learned about how to read a journal and also on how to plan for an experiment. There must be a purpose behind every experiment. Each subject or topic must have something to research on or  to be solved. In doing experiment, we must look for  other recent researches that  are related to our topics.  We also must examine the current dimensions of food studies which have been categorized into 3 dimensions which are palatability, nutritional value and also on organic concerns.

My lecturer also  gave us a homework which requires us  to predict on the food trend for year 2015.

In my opinion, the food trend for year 2015 would be fusion food. Fusion food or fusion cuisine is a cuisine that combines elements of different culinary traditions. Cuisines of this type are not categorized according to any one particular cuisine style and have played a part in the food innovations.