Gelling Properties of Agar Manufactured in Nagano

Part I. Distribution of gel strength and unit weight of bar style agar

Abstract

No offcial quality datum of the commercial agar manufrctured in Nagano has ever been published. With the purpose to establish the more scientific quality evaluation of the commercial agar, in the first experimental work, the yearly distributions of both gel strength (jelly strength in the old term) of three kinds of agar and unit weight of bar style agar were investigated. All of the samples were produced in Nagano during 1961-1968.
The widest ranges of gel strength values in these 8 years were 110 to 670 for 7, 064 samples of about 110 bar styIe agar factories, the value less than 100 to 720 for 5, 425 samples of stringy agar factories of far less numbers, and the value less than 100 to 1, 250 for 606 samples of 8 powdered agar factories. The yearly average values of gel strength were 259-316 for bar style agar, and 300-379 for stringy agar. The yearly averages of unit weight of bar style agar were 7.0-7.8g with the standard deviations of ±0.9 to ±1.0g.