A sweet experiment

On Monday on my way to work, I was reading about cryopreservation in an old issue of 21st Century (a czech magazine). Cryopreservation is a process where cells or whole tissues are preserved by cooling to low sub-zero temperatures, such as -196°C. The article desribed how problematic this process is since any cell contains a significant amount of water. When we try to freeze water, it goes through few states and one of them is crystallic state which damages cells and they die. Despite of this, some people let themselves freeze freely.

There was also described an experiment with strawberries which I decided to try. Few strawberries are put to a fridge without any treatment. They will be taken out next day, unfreezed and we can check their condition before eating them. In contrast to fresh strawberries, these will be slighly mashed and their structure will be damaged. The reason for this is just water contained in cells, which created small crystals during slow freezing and those damaged cells’ structure. We are supposed to get better results if we sugar strawberries before puting them to a fridge. Sugar can partially absorb free water.

It sounded interesting and tastily to me and then I decided to try this experiment. On my way home I stopped by in Dunnes Stores and bought two packs of strawberries in an action for 5 euro. When at home, I put 3 strawberries to a bag, sugared another 3 (unfortunately we did not have an icing sugar so I had to use a granulated one) and put them to other bag as well. Both bags were put to a fridge and the rest of strawberries were eaten by myself and Palko – anyway we know the taste of fresh strawberries and they could go off :-).

Next day I took strawberries out of the fridge, let them unfreeze and tasted them. When I tasted the sweet one, I tried to persuade myself that it is slighly better but it was not. Strawberries from both bags were kind of mashed, some of them were sweet though :-). Maybe it was caused by granulated sugar I used but anyway I would not let myself freeze not even if I was sugared properly ;-).

PS: If anyone decided to try this experiment, write your results to the comment.