—but what it can be called is a trans-fat-free or a zero-trans shortening alternative. For 10 grams of this material—I'd better speak quickly—you only get half a gram of saturated fat, and there is no trans fat. I can put on the label that they're low in saturated fats, free of trans fatty acids, and a source of omega-3 fatty acids because they're made with canola oil. They're free of cholesterol, and because there is some vitamin E there, I can even make a claim that a healthy diet low in saturated and trans fats may reduce the risk of heart disease. This product here is low in saturated and trans fats.
I also brought knives on the plane, but they took my metal knife.
As you can see, it is kind of a solid material, and this only contains about 5% solids. It's here for you to play with, if you want to. It has been tried in many baking applications, and it addresses some of the functionality, some of the physics of baking. It's made of only 5% solids. The rest is all liquid, so it contains about 60% canola oil. There is also water, and there is a substance that coats the oil and makes little balls. Can you imagine a swimming pool full of crystal balls? Inside the balls is the oil. Outside the balls is tightly bound water. You have this little collection of balloons, and the balloons are made of crystals. In a way, then, it's a collection of hollow crystals.
Let's give it the functionality of shortening. They're little crystals—they're micrometre-sized crystals—but let's make them hollow so that we don't carry the extra fat inside. I'm offering a possibility that has no trans fats and is very low in saturated fatty acids. We even made brownies with our product. I didn't bring them today because I burned the last batch at around midnight, so I couldn't do it any more.
Imagine a two-bite brownie out of the store. You could put on the label that it's trans fat free, low in saturates, a source of omega-3s, part of a healthy diet, blah, blah, blah, because it does contain only one gram of saturated fats. It's here—and I distributed these around—just by straight substitution of the main ingredients.
The high standard set by the task force has forced us in academia, as well, to look for novel solutions. Without them, who cares? Just replace this with saturated fat. But without novel solutions, are there any new ways of structuring liquid oil into a semi-solid or solid material like this that has the functionality—and that's the key—to make cookies or to make biscuits? And what's the other tough one? It's the laminated products, the pastry products. The bakers are assessing those.
There are several large companies interested in this, and they're already thinking of putting it in muffins and cookies by the end of the summer. The problem now becomes one of supply, and that's a big issue, but we're looking into that as well.
What I'm saying is that you don't have to stick to only saturated fats. I think this would be beneficial for farmers because it's an outlet for their oil, and the structuring technology would be comparable in price to a regular shortening. The supply basically comes from the local farmers.
So there's one thing, and it seems to be working all right.