ABSTRACT
In 1971, the pioneering Ron Buttery and his coworkers extracted 1500 g of potato chips for 3 h using simultaneous distillation/ extraction (SDE) with diethyl ether, followed by concentration of the solvent extract, with subsequent preparation of nonbasic and basic fractions. They used gas chromatography (GC-MS), separating each fraction using a 300-m capillary column and a 4-h temperature program. They also isolated individual compounds from the fractions, in order to obtain additional structural information by infrared spectroscopy. This was then followed by weeks of data analysis, in order to identify around 65 compounds (Buttery
et al., 1971; Buttery and Ling, 1972). Nowadays, automated solidphase microextraction (SPME), GC-MS with a 30-m capillary column, and appropriate deconvolution software make it possible to identify a similar number of compounds in a gram of chips in less than 30 min (J. S. Elmore, unpublished work), thanks to massive increases in instrument sensitivity and computer power, as well as the availability of databases containing many thousands of aroma compounds. By using cryogenic cooling of the sample inlet and a 10-m narrow-bore column, this analysis time could be reduced further.
