What are the functions of flavor enhancer?

Enhancing the flavor of foods is an art that is critical to the acceptability of foods, and a restaurant can succeed or fail depending on how that art is practiced.

Flavour enhancers intensify flavors already present, especially when the desirable flavors are relatively weak. Enhancers themselves contribute little flavor to a food.

Salt’s best known function is to enhance the flavor of foods. People like salt because human bodies need sodium chloride. Breads are less bland; cheeses are not as bitter and processed meats are more flavorful in part because of the addition of salt.

Other best-known and most popular flavor enhancer is Monosodium glutamate (MSG). Flavor enhancers intensify mostly attributes of mouth feel such as dryness and astringency.

Flavor enhancers increase the sensitivity of the taste buds thus increasing flavor. It is also suggest that an increase in salivation as a result of the flavor enhancers will increase flavor perception.
What are the functions of flavor enhancer?

Production of monosodium glutamate

By far the most important amino acid in food biotechnology and the first amino acid to be produced by fermentation is glutamate (monosodium glutamate, MSG).

It is monosodium glutamate that plays the largest role in food and in particular flavoring enhancing. Monosodium glutamate is used in a wide range of foods, including canned meat and fish, spreads, soups and other processed foods.

Monosodium glutamate is an odorless, white, crystalline substance that resembles salt. It has property of enhancing the flavor of meat and other protein foods.

Originally MSG was extracted from natural materials and hydrolyzed proteins but from the late 1950s it has been made by fermentation.

In the production of L-glutamate, only Corynebacterium glutamicum is used, although E- coli and other organism are also able to excrete glutamate.

Glutamate is synthesized from 2-oxoglutarate by one –step reaction catalyzed by the NADPH dependent glutamate dehydrogenase, which is the main pathway for glutamate formation when the ammonium concentration is sufficiently high.

Therefore, ammonium is added in a low concentration at the beginning of the fermentation and is then added continuously during the course of the fermentation.

Yield of between 60 and 70% is based in the glucose used. At the end of the fermentation the broth contains L- glutamate in the form of its ammonium salt.
Production of monosodium glutamate

Monosodium Glutamate (MSG)

Monosodium Glutamate (MSG)
Glutamic acid was isolated by Ritthausen.

In 1098 Ikeda found that MSG is the beneficial active component of the algae Lamniria japonica, used for a long time in Japan as a flavor improver of soup and similarly prepared soup.

The taste of MSG cannot be explained by a combination of sweet, salty, sour and bitter tastes.

It is, as the fifth quality, of an elementary nature. This assumption, which was made as early as 1908 by a Japanese researcher to explain the special taste called umami, was recently confirmed by the identification of a taste receptor for MSG.

Indeed MSG is one of the most important taste-bearing substances in meat and ripened for longer periods of time.

Reports by Japanese researchers that glutamyl peptides, e.g., Glu-Glu, also taste like MSG have not been confirmed.

The taste of MSG is intensified by certain nucleotides. Glutamate promotes sensory perception particularly of meat like aroma notes, and is frequently used as an additive in frozen, dehydrated or canned fish and meat products.

MSG is added in the concentration range of 0.2 – 0.8%.

The intake of larger amount of MSG by some hypersensitivity persons can trigger a “Chinese restaurant syndrome”, which is characterized by temporary disorders such as drowsiness, headache, and stomach ache and stiffening of joints. These disappear after a short time.
Monosodium Glutamate (MSG)

Flavor enhancers

Flavor enhancers
Flavorings either impart a particular flavor to foods or modify flavors already present. Flavor enhancers intensify flavor already present, especially when desirable flavors are relatively weak.

Monosodium glutamate is one of the beat known and most widely used flavor enhancers. This compound occurs naturally in many foods and in certain seaweed that was used for centuries as a flavor enhancer for soups and other foods. It is only within the last hundred years that the reason for the effectiveness of the seaweed was discovered to be MSG (Monosodium glutamate). The way in which MSG enhances flavor is mot fully understood.

While it is effective at relatively low levels (parts per thousand), there are other compounds called flavor potentiators that also enhance flavors but are extremely powerful, effective in parts per million and even per billion. These compounds have been identified as nucleotides and their effect is attributed to their synergistic properties (properties that intensify the effect of natural flavor components).
Flavor enhancers