Testing for sugar in foods

(Jan) #1

Has anyone tried this? I’ve been experimenting a lot with fermenting various foods, and currently have some country-style wines going. I’d love to be able to check the sugar content. Seems simple enough. Would love to hear anyone’s experience using urine test strips.

(Aisha Truchet) #2

I’m not sure how you’d quantify how much sugar is left in your fermented drinks with this method. I gave a talk on sugar to school children last week and used the dipsticks to show how complex carbs break down into glucose in your mouth. Dikeman and Bernstein gave me the idea.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdmK_SCA2ls&t=428s @7mins.

(Jan) #3

@Aisha, I guess I could make up a series of known %sugar solutions, and titrate the wine to match the color response? Are the test strips quantitative, or more of a yes no response to sugar presence? Do you know what the range is for the strips?
I haven’t watched your YouTube yet - having internet issues here in the boonies, can’t load anything much. Looking forward to it!
Thanks for your response.

#4

I’m a little confused by the following instruction:

“Compare the sugar result listed from the strip to the grams of sugar listed on the nutritional label.”

Surely they aren’t the same thing? Are they just using the color as a handy a/b comparison?

I did attempt to read the residual sugar in my kombucha one time. It involved diluting the kombucha with water by like, 20:1, I think, to get it in range for a blood glucometer reading. Then doing a bunch of math and deciding that pee strips might work out easier because it has a higher mg/dl range. But I never purchased them.

I might get interested in it again when the weather turns warm enough for fermenting.

[typical pee stick range - Diastix]

#5

OK, found my experiment results:

Water/Kombucha ratio 19:1 = 1/20
126 mg/dl x 20 = 2520 mg/dl = 25.2 g/l
25.2 g/l = 6.3g/8oz GLUCOSE ONLY

I did read (somewhere?) that the stix only register glucose not fructose or alcohol. So if you use this on food with regular table sugar or HFCS etc it may give you only ~half the sugars.

(Guardian of the bacon) #6

Why not just do what winemakers do? Use a hydrometer. They are pretty cheap.

http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/hydrom.asp

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013S1VAM4/ref=s9_acsd_top_hd_bw_bQc5fn_c_x_1_w?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=merchandised-search-2&pf_rd_r=X4R7R38A3Z86PPGEP7KQ&pf_rd_r=X4R7R38A3Z86PPGEP7KQ&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=cb590803-2b9c-4f06-8efe-9b070499ead2&pf_rd_p=cb590803-2b9c-4f06-8efe-9b070499ead2&pf_rd_i=393263011

(Jan) #7

Ahh, good to know, @carolT. Didn’t think about that. The wine I just started uses table sugar, and the blueberry one I want to do next would be fructose. Not so useful.

(Jan) #8

Well, Duh! That would sure make it a whole lot easier! Cheaper, too! Thanks @jfricke!

#9

I thought a winemaker hydrometer measures the density of a liquid. It then uses that correlation to estimate other components, like sugar and alcohol. No?

If you take water, and dissolve a whole bunch of salt, you will increase the density of the liquid. No sugar added. And any reading from a wine specific hydrometer would not correlate.

Fluids, like sodas, contain sugar, salt, flavourings, colourings, etc. all these components will have an influence on the density of the liquid.

(Jan) #10

I’m just interested in finding the sugar content of home-made wine, so no added salt or anything else that might interfere. I’d hope that a wine-specific hydrometer would be calibrated to work in winey situations! Thanks!

#11

I see. I understood you wanted to measure in any type of fluid.

(Jan) #12

Sorry about that! Guess I wasn’t specific enough. The attachment from LiveStrong using the urine strips was for more generic testing, but it was the first one I read when I googled.