The Application of Vacuum Impregnation Techniques in Food Industry

By A. Derossi, T. Pilli, C. Severini. 2012

53 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The interest of food scientists in the filed of microstructure is recently exponentially increased. This interest has raised after the recognition of the importance that chemical reactions and physical phenomena occurring at microscopic scale have on safety and quality of foods. This concept was well resumed from Aguilera (2005) which stated that “...the majority of elements that critically participate in transport properties, physical and rheological behavior, textural and sensorial traits of foods are below the 100 m range”. As example, Torquato (2000) reported that through microscopic observation it is possible to observe that only a portion of cells of the crumb bread solid matrix are connected, even though at macroscopic level it may appear as completely connected; so, the three dimensional spatial distribution of cell crumbs greatly affects the sensorial quality of bread. Before the scientific recognition of the above consideration, food scientists which focused their efforts on the effects of traditional and innovative industrial processes on food quality, analyzed only macroscopic indexes such as color, texture, taste, concentration of several nutritional compounds, etc. without to consider that they essentially are the result of chemical and physical phenomena occurring at microscopic level. However, with the aim to be more precise in the use of the term “microscopic” we may generalize the classification that Mebatsion et al. (2008) reported for the study of fruit microstructure. The authors considered three different spatial scales: 1. The macroscale which refers the food as a whole or a continuum of biological tissues with homogeneous properties; 2. The mesoscale which refers the topology of biological tissues; 3. The microscale which addresses the difference of individual cells in terms of cell walls, cell membranes, internal organelles, etc. Here, we would like focus the attention on the importance to study the foods at mesoscopic scale by considering them as mesoscopic divided material (MDM). On this basis the majority of foods may be defined as “biological systems where an internal surface partitions and fills the space in a very complex way”. At mesoscopic scale the three dimensional architecture of foods may be studied analyzing the relation between void and solid phases where the voids (capillaries, pores) may be partially or completely filled with liquids or gases. The relations between these two phases and their changes during processing is one of the most important factors affecting the safety and the sensorial and/or nutritional quality of foods. Until few years ago only the porosity fraction of foods was reported in literature as experimental index of the internal microstructure but it gives us only low level of information. Instead, a second level of

Subfields: Nutrition and Dietetics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2424025ec3c5a17458a8bc29f33a3a4a531bb4a3