On Crispiness and Crunchiness – or – What? WHAT??

I’m personally fascinated by the subject of crispy and/or crunchy food. No question it’s an odd thing to take an interest in. However as many of you who’ve read my bio know, I work quite a bit with food growers, packagers and purveyors. And all of them — save for the beverage makers — are continually concerned with the property of crispness and/or crunchiness. It’s a highly valued property in food among human beings generally, and lots of time, effort and money has gone into studying it.

Why are human beings so terribly fond of the crispy/crunchy sensation? Every consumer group from health nuts all the way through to couch potatoes love it, creating huge markets for everything from bagged micro-greens to kettle chips. Indeed if one were to re-categorize foods in the supermarket based on their sensory characteristics alone, “crispy” would be the largest section by far, full of everything from asparagus to apples to bacon, chips, pretzels, tater tots, pickles, candy, cookies, microwave-ready edamame and frozen thin-crust pizzas.

Food researchers theorize that a love of crispy foods is programmed into our DNA, a part of our food quality-assessing hardware/software package. And indeed there’s some fascinating lab work that’s been done to validate their ideas. Humans are startlingly good at assessing the relative freshness of fruits and vegetables, and we do this not so much by seeing or tasting so much as by feeling and listening.

Everyone knows fresh fruits and vegetables are crispy and/or crunchy, but why? It’s a property of the cells within those foods, which possess a property known as turgidity, basically their plumpness. The cells of very fresh carrots, for example, are under high pressure. Crush them between the teeth and they pop like balloons, creating vibrations in the mouth but also a clearly audible sound inside the head. We use both those inputs to judge the freshness of the carrot. And here you might have thought that the deafness you experience when eating pretzels was just an accidental byproduct of the fact that our ears are located so close to our jaws. As software developers are so fond of saying: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

As fruits and vegetables get older, they lose their turgor. Which is to say their cells experience a loss in pressure. When you bite into an old carrot its cells don’t so much pop as just separate from one another. The result is the mushy/mealy mouthfeel that humans tend not to like (indeed my oldest daughter dislikes mushy textures so much that she can’t abide mashed potatoes or even pastry cream…it’s an inherited genetic trait which breaks my poor pastry-maker’s heart). So the degree to which human beings can discern fine shades of freshness is truly startling. We can even tell what fruits, vegetables, meats or snacks we’re eating after we’ve been blindfolded and our tastebuds have been temporarily dulled. Our jaws and ears are that finely attuned.

And while sensory labs continue to churn out data by the ream on the subject of food and texture — and sociobiologists continue to advance evolutionary explanations for their findings — there are still more than a few mysteries surrounding crispiness/crunchiness. One of them directly relates to financiers, specifically: why are human beings so passionate about foods with crispy crusts and soft, moist interiors? There seems to be no precedent for such foods in nature, yet people can’t seem to get enough of fresh-baked bread (though it’s extremely lean and has relatively little flavor), fresh-fried doughnuts and chicken, “soft” pretzels, etc.. Ancient hunter-gatherers surely had no access to such foods, but if we could travel back in time and hand some of them a batch of fresh-made financiers is there much doubt they would have gone, er…ape?

I certainly don’t need an evolutionary explanation to be able to enjoy a good financier, mind you. In fact I’d rather believe that our hyper-sophisticated senses, not to mention so many of the delectable pastries that keep them so highly amused, are gifts from above. Oh yes…much rather.