Synthetic Food Coloring On Yellow Tofu
Nowadays, there are so many people who want to get money as much as possible. They don’t care on what kind of ingredients they are using to make the food that they will sell. Some of them use synthetic food coloring, textile coloring, and even borax as preservative.
In 2011, one of yellow tofu seller in Bogor got caught by using textile coloring on his tofu. He said if he doesn’t use any textile coloring, his tofu will get rotten so easily and because textile is much easier to afford.
By the way, if you don’t know what yellow tofu is, it’s a food made from soy fermentation and turmeric. To make yellow tofu, all you need is just to buy a plain tofu and dip or soak it in a tray full of turmeric and allowed it to set overnight. In the morning, you will see your tofu is covered with yellow color. And all you need to do left is to boil or fry it!!
Now, after explaining what and how to make yellow tofu, we are going to discuss and tell you how to detect synthetic food coloring on yellow tofu by using the simplest and easiest way.
Before we collect materials, we must form a hypothesis, for example: For investigating food coloring on yellow tofu, we could predict that “if it use natural coloring, the color of tofu will changes if we put it in whitewash. While using synthetic color, the tofu color will not change if we put it in whitewash.”
Then you can continue by gathering the materials you need:
-2 or more kind of yellow tofu
-Beaker
-Arloji Glass
-Water
-Limestone
How to do the experiment:
1. Prepare all the materials that have been cleaned
2. Put 1-2 limestone inside the beaker, pour a little of water, and it will become a whitewash.
3. Dip the (A) yellow tofu in the whitewash.
4. Observe and see what happen.
5. Repeat all 1-4 steps to (B) and (C) yellow tofu.
If the color of the whitewash became yellow-red-ish, that’s mean the yellow tofu contain natural food coloring. But if the color of the yellow tofu didn’t change at all, that’s mean the yellow tofu use synthetic food coloring.
If some of you confused on how whitewash can detect synthetic or not in yellow tofu, it is because turmeric will change color darker when even the slightest whitewash had a contact with them while synthetic coloring doesn’t change. The natural food coloring that usually used is turmeric.
In this reaction, turmeric as an indicator of acid&base substances. It will change the color became yellow&red when react to base. The base is the whitewash.
For conclusion, now we all get the information on how to investigate yellow tofu in a simple way using whitewash! Just prepare 2 yellow tofu and dipped it to whitewash. From now on, please be careful on what to eat because synthetic food coloring can damage your liver, kidney, gallbladder, and even cause us to death!
