National Honey Board Funds Food Competiton at Purdue….Honey
Sweet, syrupy, golden liquid twirls over the end of grooves in wooden wands and into everything from yogurt to baklava to fresh, steaming sopaipillas. It’s no secret that honey is more than a spoonful of sugar, but the National Honey Board says that American consumers prefer it over any other sweetener on the market.
In the past few years, specialty sauces like hot honey combined the classic warm, sweet feeling with a bright, spicy kick and have taken over market trends. To encourage more innovation with America’s favorite sauce, Mike Caffee, external relations and career services coordinator within the Department of Food Science at Purdue, partnered with the National Honey Board to launch a competition for students to create honey condiments.
Each of the 10 teams had to have at least one food science student on board, and several teams included students from across Purdue University. For example, agricultural and biological engineering major Siddharth Kumar, got involved after hearing about the competition through a friend’s Instagram. He joined another agricultural and biological engineering major, Alvin Cai, and two food science majors, Hayley Wong Liong and Sam Weber, to form the team “Ya like jazz?”
Team leader Wong Liong said, “We fermented our honey with garlic and we decided to combine that with gochujang, which is a red chili paste from Korea. We wanted something trendy, and K-pop music and Korean dramas are bringing in the soft powers from Korea. If so many people are being exposed to those foods, why not capitalize on the market?”
Her teammate Kumar added, “Fermenting the honey and garlic extracts more flavors, and it can change the color and viscosity, or thickness, of the sauce.”
Ya like jazz? may have taken inspiration from the infamous Bee Movie for their name in jest, but their honey condiment recipe cleverly used flavors influenced by Korean music and television shows. (From left: Hayley Wong Liong, Alvin Cai and Siddharth Kumar.)
Ya like jazz? may have taken inspiration from the infamous Bee Movie for their name in jest, but their honey condiment recipe cleverly used flavors influenced by Korean music and television shows. (From left: Hayley Wong Liong, Alvin Cai and Siddharth Kumar.)
Ya like jazz?’s gochujang honey sauce is designed with fried foods in mind. Whether it’s wings or vegetarian options like tofu, the umami flavors from the garlic honey and the heat from the red chili paste are sure to maximize the potential of every bite.
Graduate students were also welcomed to compete in the competition. Hansel Mina and Adriana Vanegas Torres, both PhD students in food safety and microbiology, are also labmates in Amanda Deering’s lab and named their team “Le parce” (translating to “The good friends”) as a testament to their shared Latin American heritage and friendship.
Mina and Vanegas created a multipurpose sauce that can be used as both a salad dressing and a meat marinade. Its flavor profile centers around passion fruit, a tropical purple fruit filled with black seeds and a tart, bright yellow pulp.
“With the honey, the passion fruit gives our sauce a sweet and acidic taste,” Mina said. “It tastes like Argentinian chimichurri with a touch of the tangy tropical fruit.”
Vanegas and Mina decided not to use any preservatives and relied on their training in food safety to use a heat treatment and bottling method to protect the sauce. They also brought in other challenging ingredients, like panela cane sugar that comes in the form of a brown block. They’d like to use Boiler Bee Honey from Purdue’s hives if they have the chance to go commercial.
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