Everybody loves french fried, but overcooked french fries can be bad, and not only in flavor. When fries get overcooked they can form a toxic compound called acrylamide. This compound has been shown to cause cancer, but current techniques for detecting it have been very expensive and complicated.
At the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Food Science Research Unit (FSRU) in Raleigh, North Carolina, scientists are working to reduce acrylamide in food. A team led by food scientist Suzanne Johanningsmeier has developed a method that rapidly estimates the amount of acrylamide in white potato French fries using a new technique called "Near-infrared spectroscopy" (NIRS).
Researchers involved in the study, which was supported by the USDA-National Institute of Food and Agriculture Specialty Crop Research Initiative Grant, included FSRU research leader Van-Den Truong and North Carolina State University (NCSU) sweetpotato and potato breeder Craig Yencho and postdoc, Oluwatosin Adedipe.
“The goal is to understand and mitigate the formation of acrylamide, which also occurs in other foods when they are fried, roasted, or baked at high temperatures,” Johanningsmeier said. “The current process to determine the amount of acrylamide in food requires sophisticated analytical techniques, such as gas or liquid chromatography in conjunction with mass spectrometry. These methods take a long time and require expensive instrumentation.”
“We analyzed the data obtained from both the analytical chemistry technique and NIRS,” Johanningsmeier said. “We then developed a model relating the NIRS output to the amount of acrylamide in the French fries, showing that we could rapidly estimate the acrylamide content using the NIRS technology, which is also less expensive than the standard analytical chemistry methods.”
