Crispness assessment of roasted almonds by an integrated approach to texture description: texture, acoustics, sensory and structure

This study combines passive acoustic and mechanical measures of sensory crispness. We show that the acoustic signal is dominated by 'bursts' of sound associated with crack failure events in the product which also release measurable amounts of elastic energy. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and principal component analysis (PCA) were performed on the sensory, acoustical, mechanical and compositional parameters. We show that this chemometric approach is a powerful method for the objective analysis of large, complex data sets in the context of human sensory studies and the objective measure of a sensory parameter, in this case crispness. We demonstrate that sensory crispness in almonds is an amalgam of acoustic and mechanical effects occurring during chewing. We show that our method is capable of predicting the crispness of roasted almonds. Copyright (c) 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.