Cornell University's food development team has created a new ultra-low calorie butter made mostly from water.
100 grams of this butter 2.0 contains 17,5 grams of fat and 157 calories. Traditional butter, on the other hand, is 84% fat and 16% water, has 68 grams of fat and a whopping 625 calories.
How was this butter born?
The Cornell team developed a new process to emulsify a large part of water with tiny drops of vegetable oil and cream to mimic traditional butter, but with a quarter of the calories and without artificial stabilizers.
“Imagine that with 80% water and 20% oil we created something with the consistency of butter, with the palatability of butter and the creaminess of butter,” says the food technologist and author of the research Alireza Abbaspourrad.
An emulsion between water and oil is nothing new, he says Abbaspourrad, but using the new method called internal high phase emulsions (HIPE), “We continued to add water with great balance and precision until we made butter 2.0 which contains four times as much fat”.
The demand for products with high protein and low fat content has grown rapidly thanks to the increasing awareness of consumers.
Food choices are becoming more mature, and the industry is adapting its production to the renewed needs of the public. In the dairy sector, research even involves the creation of a synthetic milk.
The HIPE technology allows to greatly increase the water component compared to fats, preserving the function and density of food. This makes it a key technology in creating healthier solutions for consumers.
A container of nourishment
The ability to create these emulsion "microbubbles" allows milk proteins as well as vegetable proteins to be added to a product such as butter. You can spice up a product with special flavors or vitamins. This is how butter 2.0 was born with very little saturated fat, but the technology can also be applied to other foods.
Study references:
Michelle C. Lee, Chen Tan, Raheleh Ravanfar, Alireza Abbaspourrad. Ultrastable Water-in-Oil High Internal Phase Emulsions Featuring Interfacial and Biphasic Network Stabilization. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 2019; 11 (29): 26433 DOI: 10.1021 / acsami.9b05089
