| Bubble tea now in bottles |
|
|
| Written by Brandon Macz | ||||
| Friday, 27 October 2006 | ||||
|
The food science department received refreshing news when a team of students was chosen to receive the Danisco Knowledge Award and $10,000 for revolutionizing a technique for bubble tea. One facet of their business at Danisco is creating food ingredients. Students around the country experiment with food improvement initiatives, typically on an industrial scale. This year five University of Idaho students beat out teams from Michigan State, Cal Poly Tech and Virginia Tech, among others. Team captain Brian Huber gives credit for the idea to teammate Colin Seeley who said bubble tea was trendy in cafes in California where he used to live. Originating in Asia, the drink has grown popular because of its health benefits. An on-the-spot creation, bubble tea mixes a green tea base with boiled tapioca balls which provides drinkers with helpful digestive bacteria. Bubble tea can’t be found bottled because tapioca balls break down too fast in the tea. “As far as we know it’s never been done,” Seeley said. Huber said the drink is the first of its kind. The innovative process that led to the UI team’s success was using a Danisco ingredient containing alginate to capsulate the beneficial bacteria. Alginate is a liquid that can safely house bacteria that die in high temperatures or moisture. “Basically keeping them alive in the drink,” Seeley said. The solution was put through a filter the team created, called the “BobaBlaster 10,000.” This device allowed for tiny drops of alginate mixed with bacteria to fall into a calcium bath, which solidified the solution into BB-sized balls. The shape comes from the surface tension between the alginate and its fall into the calcium bath, Seeley said. Symboba is the name the team decided on for the drink because of its dual or symbiotic ingredients and ‘boba’ being the name of the bacterial balls. To give the tea range, Huber said they went with two flavors. One is a traditional, creamy guava-peach mix called, “Pearls of Wisdom.” “PandaBerry” is Symboba’s cranberry-raspberry juice mix for those who would prefer fruity to its creamy counterpart. “We wanted to show how diverse this product could be,” Seeley said. “It’s like a microbe cocktail.” Washington State University took first place in 2004 when the last competition was held and invited UI’s food science department to join them this year. This was the first time WSU offered this invitation, according to Huber. Starting out as a collaboration of students from both colleges, various conflicts eventually left only five UI students using the labs at WSU. “WSU has better facilities because everything is in one location,” Huber said. Their adviser, associate professor of food sciences Stephanie Clark, was the only Cougar on the team. Clark wasn’t allowed to do anything physical with the project aside from helping with entry forms and deciphering the good ideas from the bad ones, Huber said. Clark joined Huber in Florida where they received a giant $10,000 check and their award. The expense-paid trip offered other lucrative opportunities to the UI senior, who said the bubble tea project incorporated aspects of chemistry, microbiology, engineering and marketing. “It was an excellent opportunity to network with people in the food industry,” Huber said. Making tea wasn’t enough to win Danisco’s contest, according to Seeley. Huber and teammate Kameron Pecka designed a schematic for how the bubble tea would be processed in a factory without human contact, which would make the bacteria useless. Manually bottled for the contest, Symboba tea had to have labels for its two flavors. Teammate Kristen Pecka used her knowledge of photoshop for this part of the marketing process. New products need a general consensus, so the food science team took Symboba to Moxie Java on Sixth Street for a taste test. People with experience with bubble tea tended to approve more than those without, Seeley said. “Some people actually didn’t like it just because of the texture,” Huber said. Winning the Danisco challenge meant forfeiting the idea to the company who can choose to market its ingredients for sale, to any other company interested in producing bubble tea. Orphaned from their big break in food science and food improvement initiatives, Huber said their scientific appetites were not satisfied. “We want some more,” he said. “We got a taste of it. The taste was pretty ‘sweet.’ The sky’s the limit.”慰  Add as favorites (92) | Views: 2260
Only registered users can write comments.
|
||||
