You try making a cookie without sugar, fat, carbs

By Aaron Zitner
Los Angeles Times

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — For a truly distasteful treat, it's hard to top Colleen Zammer's orange ice cream. It starts off sweet as a summer day — then wallops the tongue with a taste like rancid fish, so strong you can almost smell the fins and scales.

Then again, Zammer's smoothies can be pretty bad, too: all liquid on top, with globs of protein at the bottom. And how about the simple butter cookie? Hers taste as if they were baked under the hood of a diesel truck.

It's a snack-food house of horrors in Zammer's industrial kitchen, a place where foods are taken apart, outfitted with new ingredients and pieced back together. Zammer may cut the carbohydrates. Or swap one type of fat for another. Or mix in flavorings, nutrients or other additives.

The goal is to rebuild foods so that they are more healthful, with less to clog the arteries or lard the waistline. But Zammer, a consultant to the processed-food industry, sometimes turns the foods into foul-tasting Frankensteins, as well. Despite decades of work, she and other food scientists are still grappling with how to boost the nutritional value of snacks and other fare without mangling the taste.

Reformulation

The effort is called food reformulation, and it is taking a central role in the U.S. battle against obesity and heart disease. Snack giant Kraft Foods is trying to remake its Oreo cookie with less sugar and fat and fewer calories. Kellogg says it may cut fat from its Keebler cookies.

And a variety of other food companies, from McDonald's to Frito-Lay, have been scrambling to find replacements for trans fats, which many nutritionists consider a public menace. Trans fats have no more calories than other fats but are thought to be particularly hard on the arteries.

Accused of fattening their profits by fattening consumers, the food giants want to show that they are taking health concerns seriously. With two-thirds of Americans considered overweight or obese, reformulation is part of the industry's response to lawmakers, nutritionists and trial lawyers who say food companies deserve a super-size portion of the blame.

Some of the industry's biggest critics say reformulating certain foods could improve public health.

"In some cases it can make a big difference, changing a cookie from one that clogs the arteries to one that doesn't," said Margo Wootan of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington, D.C., consumer-advocacy group that tracks nutrition issues. "It's a way to eat healthier that's about as easy as it gets, because you keep eating the same foods as before. They just won't be as bad for you."

'Taste trade-off'

But reformulated foods face a big hurdle.

"Products that are fat-free or sugar-free — there's often a taste trade-off there," said Michael Mudd, a Kraft spokesman. "The healthiest food in the world will do no good if no one eats it."

That is where Colleen Zammer comes in. She puts a new face on foods that have been stripped of some of their most appealing ingredients.

"When you take something out of a food, you change its whole character," said Zammer, who runs the 15-person food and nutrition unit at Tiax LLC, a consulting firm just outside Boston that gave Cap'n Crunch cereal its familiar vanilla-caramel flavoring and has helped Procter & Gamble, Tropicana and others develop new products.

"Fat tastes good," she said. "It feels good in the mouth. It's a good way to bind things together. And when you take it out, there's no single ingredient that can be added to perform all of those functions.

"Our job is to put foods back together so that they look like the original, but they are made up of better components."

Nevertheless, one recent day in the Tiax kitchen the work of putting foods back together was hitting a few snags. Navigating amid steel storage racks and industrial cooking equipment, product developer Paul Darrigo pulled a tray of small, doughy chips out of an oven and set it on a counter. Then, he and Zammer began trying to break the chips in half.

They did not like what they heard.

A client had asked Zammer to develop a low-carbohydrate version of a potato chip or Cheez Doodle-style snack. In those foods, a big, satisfying crunch is crucial, and it comes largely from the thin bubbles that arise on the surface of the potatoes or other carbohydrates when they are fried.

Zammer calls it "a glassy, crispy texture that melts quickly in the mouth."

But these warm disks were more like rubber pucks. Because Zammer had to cut fat and carbohydrates, they were made mostly from dense, baked soy protein.

She and Darrigo tore at the disks.

"They bend, but they're not breaking," Zammer lamented. "They don't have any snap. That means there's still too much moisture in the dough."

"I'll try baking them longer," Darrigo offered.

"The texture of a snack is incredibly important, which is why we're working on that first," Zammer said. Only after perfecting the crunch would her team start working out the flavorings.

Around her, in various tubs and containers, were the results of other attempts. Some disks had the rigid quality of a pretzel, not the fragile crisp she was aiming for. Others were hollow globs that resembled rubber ravioli.

"Maybe the answer is to use a different soy protein. There are hundreds of them," Zammer said. Maybe the right crunch would come from mixing in more fiber, or cooking the snack with jets of hot air, not in a conventional oven. Already, the team had tried 30 formulations, and it would make at least 100 more.

'Flavor system'

Creating a food requires the laboratory skills of a chemist and the sensitive palate of a wine expert. To a food scientist, nothing tastes simply good or bad. Instead, each food has a "flavor system," a carefully calibrated formulation that might include fats, flavorings, enzymes, proteins, binding agents, moisture-trapping humectants or other additives.

Most people see a chocolate-chip cookie. Zammer sees a flour-based flavor system of aromatics and buffers and modified starches. And chocolate chips.

The Tiax staff has had many successes. Slim-Fast meal-replacement beverages came from its kitchen. So did Dreyer's reduced-calorie ice cream.

But there is also a certain pleasure in the failures that arise along the way.

"We worked on a low-fat hot dog, and some of them were really bad," Zammer recalled. "We did get a good product, but the disasters along the way were... "

The obesity crisis has sparked consumer interest in products that claim to be "light" or "lean," as well as in energy bars, sports drinks and products with soy or other "good for you" additives.

The biggest food fad is the high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet, driven by the popularity of the Atkins and South Beach diet plans. In 2000, 28 new products were marketed as low in carbohydrates, says the Mintel Group, a market research firm in Chicago. Last year, that jumped to 307.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company