(单词翻译:单击)
听力文本
Mmmm, chips.One of the most sublime of salty snacks.
But have you ever wondered how they get that perfectly salty sheen on the outside?
"Salt is sprayed on the surface."
Youngsoo Lee is a food engineer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
And he says not all salty foods are created equal.
There's spray-on surface salt.
There's salty liquids, like canned soup.
And then there are salty solids, where the sodium is dissolved in a matrix like structure.
Think:salamis and cheeses.
But when we eat those salty solids, only a fraction of the salt gets released before we swallow.
Meaning a lot of that salt has no effect on taste—but a big effect on our daily salt intake.
Lee's investigating that salty-solid conundrum for a company that wants to make cold cuts that taste the same but contain less salt.
He couldn't tell me which one.
"Um... I mean, it's a fairly big U.S.-based food company."
To find a salty solution he and his colleagues created blocks of whey protein with various proportions of fat, water and salt.
Then they squashed those tofulike blocks underwater, to measure how much sodium the blocks released.
Turns out, the bigger and more numerous the pores within the blocks' protein structure the more salt that was released.
The study is in the Journal of Food Science.
Lee didn't actually have taste-testers sample different types of pore-filled blocks—that's next.
But previous studies have shown that airier,fluffier breads do indeed taste saltier to testers.
And there's one other trick this study uncovered: solid foods release more of their embedded salt over time.
So next time you're about to ask for the salt, why not just spend a little more time chewing instead?
参考译文
嗯，薯条。含盐量很高的一款零食。
但你有没有对每一片薯条表面是怎样有如此完美的咸味感到好奇?
“因为薯条的表面喷洒了盐。”
伊利诺斯州厄巴纳大学香槟分校食品工程师李英秀说。
而且他还表示咸味食物所含的盐分并不都是均等。
有的是在表面洒盐。
还有的是像汤罐头一样的液体盐。
当然还有在一个矩形类似结构中进行钠溶解的固体盐。
比如萨拉米和奶酪。
当我们吃下这些盐粒时，吞咽前只有一小部分盐会被释放。
这表明还有很多盐分并没有对味觉起到应有作用—但却大大影响了我们日常的盐分摄入量。
李的研究帮助解决了一家食品公司的固体盐难题，这家公司希望在冷盘上使用更少的盐同时不失味道水准。
但李不愿透露这家公司。
“我只能说，这是一家规模相当大的美国食品公司。”
为了找到解决办法，他和同事们用不同比例的脂肪、水和盐分创造出各种大块的乳清蛋白质。
然后他们在水中将那些像豆腐一样的块状物压碎，计算释放出多少钠。
结果他们发现，块状蛋白结构气孔越大越多，释放的盐分也就越多。
这项研究已经在《食品科学》杂志上发表。
李并没有进行品尝各种不同气孔块状物的测试—那是接下来他们要做的。
但目前的研究已表明遍布气孔且蓬松的面包会更咸。
而且这项研究还发现了另一个奇妙的事情：那就是随着时间推移，固体食品会释放更多所含的盐分。
所以下次当你觉得不够咸时，为什么不多嚼嚼看呢?
译文为可可英语翻译，未经授权请勿转载！
重点讲解
1.want to 应该；想要
例句:What do you want to do?
那你想做什么呢？
2.turn out 结果是
例句:If I had known my life was going to turn out like this, I would have let them kill me...
如果我早知道自己的人生结局会是如此，我当时宁愿让他们杀了我。
3.ask for 请求，要求
例句:Any market participant can ask for a ruling.
市场里任何一位交易者都有权要求判决。
4.blocks of 块状的
例句:This makes it more difficult to deal in large blocks of shares without affecting the price and alerting competitors to tradingstrategies.
这就加大了在不影响价格、不让竞争对手注意到交易策略的情况下进行大宗股票交易的难度。
