As potato crisps are a product with extreme variation from crisp to crisp and bag to bag, the method had to be designed in a way that took this in to account, while still being about to consistently measure the texture of the product overall.
Each test replication involved the texture analyser doing 4 compressions to increasing levels of displacement. Each compression was at a speed of 1000 mm/min. The displacements were 120 mm, 100 mm, 80 mm, and 60 mm respectively. The displacement is based on the distance from the bottom of the container; which in this case was set to be absolute zero. After each compression, the system relaxed or backed off 10 mm from the compression displacement. The test program was designed to mimic the act of chewing.
Once the test was complete, the work (or area under the curve) needed to for the system to ‘chew’ the crisps was calculated using the Texture Lab Pro software. Below is the graphical representation of the samples that were tested. The X-axis is displacement and the Y-axis is force.
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