Top of the Morning!

Sunday night we set up the brines and woke up early Monday morning to start peeling and slicing the sweet potatoes! We got everything set up and figured out so that we could get all of the water activity testing we would need to have more data points in our graph. Our plan is to take water activity readings every three hours for this run so we can see how dry the sweet potatoes are able to get for a longer period of drying.

Water activity readings for five different treatments of sweet potatoes takes us about an hour to do. During the two hour break in between, I was able to do my much needed laundry. I did a lot too, so my hands were getting a little raw from wringing out the water. As we have been cutting into the samples, they are extremely hard! I almost got a blister on my hand from cutting the sweet potatoes up. I'm going to have to change how I cut the sweet potatoes once in a while so a blister doesn't form. My hands are probably a lot stronger than they were before!

After talking with Emily yesterday morning, the plan was to go about as if we were to carry out the sensory testing. A lot of planning and methods go into it, so we wanted to make sure that if we were to be able to do it this week, that it would be a success. It added quite a bit of stress to our day, but it was a good experience. That evening, we got another call from Emily about the sensory testing and it turns out that it will be a no-go because we will need her help in coming to Blessings Hospital, which is incredibly hard to arrange for her because of her sociology testing this week. We don't really have the manpower for it. Also, it is comforting to know that the main use of these dried potatoes will be in soup form, so the flavors that the sweet potatoes have from the pretreatments will not have a huge effect. We also worked on rehydrating the sweet potatoes and on the salt pretreatments, Renee didn't think they tasted salty.

With our water activity readings, we will be waking up at around 5:30am to make sure that we can get the readings taken starting at 6:00am. I haven't woken up that early in a long time! We'll be doing that the rest of the week for sure! We do our last set of water activity readings at 6:00pm. On Thursday and Friday with our last run of sweet potatoes, we are going to take readings every two hours to get more data points along the beginning curve of dehydration.

That's the update so far!