Meat & Potatoes

Swedish scientists are adding the potato, or at least its starch, to ground meat prior to cooking. The combo doesn't taste any different from an ordinary burger, say the researchers, but the potato additive dramatically limits the amount of carcinogens that forms while the meat cooks.

Most food-safety concerns associated with hamburger have focused on raw or undercooked beef as a vehicle for potentially lethal germs. However, chemists have warned for years of another problem, carcinogens that form when a burger or other meat is cooked using an especially hot grill, fry pan, or broiler.

At high temperatures, certain natural constituents of the meat—the simple sugar glucose, the amino acid creatinine, and additional free amino acids—can chemically react to form carcinogenic heterocyclic amines (HCAs). Typically, the longer meat cooks at a high temperature, the greater the production of HCAs.

One gram of carbohydrates was added per 100 grams of meat.

In its new study, Skog's group again made uniform, 90-gram burgers—each roughly 90 millimeters in diameter. They grilled the meat for 5 minutes at 200°C in an appliance that simultaneously made contact with the top and bottom of the hamburgers. Afterward, a team member sliced the crust—typically about 30 grams of meat—off each burger and chemically analyzed the material.

Overall, the burgers treated with potato starch developed the lowest total quantity of HCAs in their crust, just 5.5 nanograms per gram of cooked meat, Skog's team reports in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. The next best performer was a fructose-glucose mix, which yielded roughly 8 ng/g. By contrast, the untreated burgers ended up with an HCA content of 60 ng/g, and the one laced with only salt and TPP yielded HCAs at 16 ng/g.

A patty's weight loss during frying, attributable primarily to moisture loss, ranged at about 25 percent, for burgers containing potato fiber. This means is that the HCA-fighting starch also produced a juicy burger.

Taken from Science News Weekly, Dec. 4, 2004; Vol. 166, No. 23. “How Carbs Can Make Burgers Safer,” By Janet Raloff