Japanese traditional cuisine “Washoku” was registered as one of the intangible cultural heritages in December 2013. “Washoku” contains and requires large amount of sugar, therefore, sugar is an important seasoning in taste. Japanese have been using many kinds of sugar such as Granulated sugar, White soft sugar, Brown soft sugar, White crystal sugar and Light brown crystal sugar according to application, for both home cooking and processed foods. Mitsui Sugar is focusing on the difference in taste of sugars to develop new attractive sugar products. With a sensory evaluation method, trained panelists could recognize the difference between these sugars though it is quite difficult to explain. Therefore one attempte624-627d to detect the taste difference in these sugars by using a taste sensing system. The system comes with a human taste model membrane and can analyze the density and balance of several tastes such as sweetness, bitterness, umami** and saltiness. The accuracy of the sensing system was evaluated by comparing the results against the sensory evaluation method by trained panelists.
The sensing system was able to detect the difference in taste of Japanese sugars, and the results from the sensing system seemed to match with the ones from the sensory evaluation method. The results were plotted on a taste map. This map will be helpful not only in showing the difference between the sugars, but also in explaining the characteristics of the new products.
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