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Cotton Candy Grapes — Naturally Flavoured? · Hydroponics Daily

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  Hello there and welcome back to
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  Hydroponics Daily, your go-to podcast for everything soilless cultivation.
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  I'm your host, Dr. Russell Sharp, the founder of Utrema Limited.
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  We manufacture really completely unique fertilisers, biostimulants and biopesticides.
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  So check it out on utrema.co.uk while you're listening to this podcast.
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  On a previous episode of Hydroponics Daily, I
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  talked about artificially flavoured hydroponic crops
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  and how some people who are on the sort
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  of organic side of vegetables and don't
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  know what they're talking about but have a big mouth often say
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  that hydropodic crops are artificially flavoured and they
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  are not despite what people may think and i
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  was thinking about this on the way to work today because i was listening to a podcast
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  not my podcast the rock and roll football podcast one
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  of my favourite ones with matt ford and matt dyson on absolute
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  radio and they were talking about they always talk about food they
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  have terrible diets and just absolutely
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  you know they have such bad diets they often get gout yeah
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  that's not even a joke and one of
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  the foods they were talking about today was cotton candy and
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  cotton candy grapes and how it was
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  a good alternative to a sweet treat even though
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  grapes themselves are a sweet treat and cotton candy grapes and one of the presenters
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  matt dyson was saying that they really do taste of cotton candy these grapes
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  they're one of the few hyped foods that live up to the hype and i was like oh
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  this is interesting are they artificially flavored.
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  And I thought I'd do some digging into this and do a podcast episode about it.
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  So was I wrong about artificially flavoured fruits? And it turns out I was not.
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  These are not unnaturally flavoured fruits.
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  They are naturally flavoured. And you can get candy floss or don't call them
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  candy floss, do you, in America?
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  It's cotton candy, yes. But in the UK, we call it candy floss.
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  And in other countries, they have lots of different names for it.
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  I think my favorite is turkey
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  where i think they call it grandma's beard or
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  grandma's hair in in in
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  spain it's granddad's beard
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  in turkey it's grandma's hair
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  and that's funny because my uh kids my
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  my mom is has had pink hair and so
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  they would they would definitely associate cotton candy with
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  grandma's hair so that's funny so that's by
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  the by cotton candy grapes where do
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  they come from how are they made how do they get you their unique flavored it's
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  not genetic modification they are traditionally plant
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  bred so who created it it was developed by international fruit
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  genetics ifg a breeding company in california led
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  by horticulturalist david kane and he
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  used natural cross pollination to the pollen from one
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  grape manually pollinated it with another and grew thousands of the resulting
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  seedlings and that's difficult on grapes because it is a woody perennial which
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  means it takes a few years to flower so this is a long process that takes over
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  a decade to produce plants once he's got those seedlings each seedling produces
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  grapes with slightly different flavors.
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  And him and his team then tasted and evaluated them over many years,
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  selecting only the vines that had unusually strong, sweet, vanilla-like flavor.
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  It's got to be vanilla for cotton candy.
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  And the aroma that people associated with cotton candy.
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  It's got to have good texture, size, and growing reliability.
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  So there's a lot of time, a lot of money that went into production of these
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  over a decade from the initial crosses to commercial release.
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  I think they must have had known that they could, some grapes
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  every now and again came out with a slight cotton candy taste so
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  that they could think well can we actually breed increase
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  this by breeding that genetics to make
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  it more powerful you can only work with the genes that you've
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  got there though so if the genes aren't there for cotton candy to
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  begin with then you can't breed it
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  you can't breed a banana that tastes like a potato or a potato that
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  tastes like a strawberry because the genes aren't there so no genes
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  were inserted in the lab the flavor comes from natural flavor compounds known
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  as ethylmolitol and they're
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  concentrated through selective breeding interestingly not
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  valinin which is the chemical the
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  that produces vanilla in vanilla like flavor in vanilla so
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  in short cotton candy results in results from patient old
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  school breeding combining modern flavors oh i'm just getting a phone call let
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  me stop recording there so it was jake phoning me for he's been locked out of
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  the factory we're not recording this on christmas day i uh even though i am
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  a bit of an ebenezer scrooge recorded a few days before he he doesn't know anything
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  about horticulture he's not a horticulturalist he works in the factory.
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  Jake have you tried cotton candy grapes yes oh there's so i haven't so jake
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  did they taste like cotton candy not really no ah so you i heard that they did
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  taste like cotton candy so do you would you buy them again,
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  nah stick with normal stick with normal grapes there you have it the taste test
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  by jake from daventry says that cotton candy grapes don't live up to the hype
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  so there you go one person says it does one person says it doesn't and it's
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  not just grapes that people are trying to attempt this with you're also looking
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  at strawberries there's a number of research projects looking at strawberries,
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  i heard once that used to get strawberries in loads of
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  different flavors i used to be able to get like pineapple strawberries and
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  things like this but we lost the genetics and now we only get strawberry flavored
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  strawberries there is a researcher looking to breed specifically
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  for flavor often plant breeders are breeding for yield and pest and disease
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  resistance but those are those so in florida we've got mark porter and he's
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  leading a novel research project and his faculty advisors i think it's a phd project.
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  And they're looking at this strawberry breeding for flavor at the University
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  of Florida College of Agriculture and Life Science.
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  They tasted more than 5,000 strawberries during their two growing seasons and
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  scored the fruit on a scale of one to five for flavor, sweetness, and sourness.
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  Now you might think you don't want sourness, but sourness and sweetness together
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  is often a common flavor characteristic that's neglected.
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  So to find the flavor genes, they'd examine
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  the whole genome of a strawberry which has over
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  100 000 genes and they're
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  using this to select genes scientists found genes
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  controlling peachy and caramel aromas that
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  strawberry consumers prefer and develop dna tests
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  to rapidly identify those genes so you could screen the
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  crossbred plants the seeds the plants that
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  germinated from those crosses much faster and so
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  potentially this could lead to lots
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  of different new flavors of strawberry or better
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  flavored strawberries as well obviously it will require
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  some very good marketing people to come up with the names
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  of these new varieties and flavor profiles because
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  cotton candy grapes is a great marketing coup
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  so if you can think of a good peachy strawberry princess
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  peach strawberries there you go and caramel caramel chaos
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  or something like that then yeah then these could be on on on the shelves of
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  a supermarket soon or you could be able to get those plants and grow them in
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  your hydroponic strawberry setup sort of high value strawberries obviously people
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  have bred the white strawberries and these are very very expensive strawberries
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  compared to the red ones obviously they taste,
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  not very different and there are there is a vertical farm company can't think of the name of it the.
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  Very successful growing high-value strawberries. They have carved out that niche
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  and everyone tries to get into that niche, but they've got good moats around
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  their niche that so far no one else has been able to get into.
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  What is the name of that company that uses hydroponic strawberries?
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  Is it a Yoshi or something like that? Premium hydroponic strawberries.
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  I'll give myself 10 seconds to find it and see if i can find it no can't find
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  it oh the first thing oh yeah i found it oishii o-i-s-h-i-i that they're the
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  market leaders in vertical farmed premium strawberries in their plastic packaging
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  unfortunately so yeah that's been hydroponics daily for today,
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  novel flavored fruit and veg that or
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  say fruit that has not come from artificial flavorings thank you
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  very much for listening if you found this at all interesting
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  Thank you very much for listening and until tomorrow goodbye.