Food rheology

In ancient Egypt, bakers judged the consistency of dough by rolling it in their hands.

Because foods are structurally complex, often a mixture of fluid and solids with varying properties within a single mass, the study of food rheology is more complicated than study in fields such as the rheology of polymers.

For this reason, examples of food rheology are didactically useful to explain the dynamics of other materials we are less familiar with.

Ketchup is commonly used an example of Bingham fluid and its flow behavior can be compared to that of a polymer melt.

It is not necessarily straightforward to predict how a food will "feel" based purely on the true rheological properties.