• Tomoyuki Narisawa Chief, Saitama Industrial Technology Center, Northern Laboratory

• Sawako Shirahase TCJS Director

Improving food self-sufficiency ratio is a big issue in Japan, and increasing the use of domestic wheats is one of the effective means. Our laboratory has conducted studies to increase the use of domestic wheats for Udon noodles. “Norin61” (N61), a domestic wheat that was once popular in Japan, remains a perennial favorite because of its excellent sensory characteristics including the unique taste/flavor compared with Australian Standard White (ASW) wheat. Currently, N61 has been replaced by “Satonosora”, which is one of the successors of N61. Satonosora has desirable properties for agricultural producer such as disease resistance and crop yields like ASW, but it is inferior in Udon making because of a less unique flavor compared with N61. Through the chemical analysis to clarify the formation mechanism of the Udon flavor, I established a technique for flavor enrichment in the noodle-making process. The technique has been recently applied to the development of new value-added noodle products by various companies.

Tomoyuki Narisawa is a chief at Saitama Industrial Technology Center Northern Laboratory. He obtained a Bachelor in Science from Josai University in 2008, a Master of Arts and Sciences from the University of Tokyo in 2010, and a Ph.D. in Agriculture from the University of Tokyo in 2019. For a year in FY2013, he was seconded as a technology liaison fellow to a division of university corporate relations, the University of Tokyo. His research interests are food science and food analysis in local foods, especially wheat