Enhancing flavor of Tomatoes-Modified packing house practice

Tomato is one of the most liked vegetables, its use in many preparations and as a salad component being universal. In many diets and customary eating it is consumed almost every day across the world. Besides being a nutritious food, it also enriches flavors of many cooked foods and is a standard component of a good salad. No wonder the tomato paste industry is well established, catering to the needs of millions of consumers who find it is a convenient product with many application potential. A curious question many people find it difficult to answer is whether tomato is a fruit or a vegetable? As its sugar content is very low, unlike that in fruits, tomato is legally classified as a vegetable but still many people consider it as a fruit. What does a consumer expect from tomato? The crisp texture, attractively smooth appearance, intense color, juiciness and mild flavor. In contrast the tomato industry from growers to handlers, distributors and processors look for other more important qualities which include hard fruit resistant to damage during storage and transportation, longer shelf life and higher solid contents. Interestingly tomato production is concentrated in China and India, both together accounting for more than 30% of the global production of 170 million tons per year and therefore development of new varieties with better characteristics and yield is rather limited in these countries. In contrast advance countries like the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland lead the productivity race with average productivity in the range of 430 to 480 tons per hectare. The path breaking research in evolving a genetically modified variety called FlarSavr took place in the US which was a dream come true for the industry though consumers never accepted this GM product.in nineteen nineties. Almost 75% of the tomato produced is consumed in the fresh form which reflects the importance of delivering farm fresh tomatoes to the consumer with least time delay and minimum damage. According to a group of scientists working in the US commercially marketed tomato does not possess good flavor because of the practices followed by the industry which do not allow the metabolic system in the crop to function and generate optimum flavor. A new approach is being suggested to modify the handling practices that will enhance the flavor very significantly. Read further below:  

"The distinct flavor of tomatoes is due to a cocktail of chemicals produced by the fruits as they ripen, but, according to the team that includes the USDA, the Agricultural Research Service, and the University of Florida, conventional storage methods inhibit these flavors. If tomatoes seem more flavorsome when bought from a farm stand, that's because they're being sold in the ideal condition – fully ripe and immediately after picking. However, commercially grown tomatoes need to be shipped hundreds, if not thousands of miles to reach market along with delays in packing and unpacking. Shipping ripe tomatoes over any distances risks unacceptable levels of spoilage, so the tomatoes are picked green, treated with ethylene gas to induce ripening, and then chilled for shipping. According to team leader Jinhe Bai, this chilling prevents flavor compounds, such as 6-methyl-5-hepten-2-one, 2-methylbutanal, and 2-phenylethanol from forming and the tomatoes end up with a watery taste. To avoid this, the team added an extra step. Instead of sending Florida-grown green tomatoes straight on to chilling, the team plunged them into 125° F (52° C) water for five minutes, then cooled them to room temperature before a final chilling to between 41° and 55° F (5° and 13° C), which is the standard shipping temperature. Compared to a control group, the team found that the treated tomatoes had more smell and flavor, as well as higher levels of flavor compounds. According to Bai, this is due to the heat treatment regulating certain ripening enzymes and activating the production of a protein that makes the tomatoes tolerant of cell decay. "Chilling suppresses production of oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur-containing heterocyclic compounds, ketones, alcohols and aldehydes, including 13 important aroma components of tomato flavor," says Bai."But hot water-treated fruit actually produced higher concentrations of these important aroma contributors, even with subsequent chilling." The team is currently testing the technique at various stages of ripeness to see how it affects flavor compound production. Bai says the next step is to determine which method is the most effective before offering it to food processing firms. In addition, they're trying alternatives to hot water, such as methyl salicylate (wintergreen oil), which is an anti-fungal fumigant, and 1-methylcyclopropene when the tomatoes are at the slightly riper green/pink stage to make the fruit more tolerant to cell decay when at higher storage temperatures."

Even to day why are people preferring to buy wine ripened tomato or directly from farm gates offering fresh ripened crops? Simply because these crops possess much better flavor compared to that bought from a supermarket. As explained by the authors of the above study, development of flavor from a cocktail of chemicals present in tomato depends on temperature. The commercial practice, heavily dependent on chilling to low temperatures for long distance transportation in the distribution chain to prevent physical damage, does not allow the inherent enzyme systems to act on the dormant precursors for conversion into the characteristic flavorful substances. The heat shock method developed by them is claimed to be able to "wake up" the metabolic activity which sets of the process of generating flavor substances. Since the method is very simple there should not be any logistical problem to incorporate this step into the currently practiced protocol. Hot water treatment has the additional advantage of sanitizing the product to some extent by killing some of the undesirable microbes. Way back in nineteen sixties a similar heat treatment was developed in India for mangoes for reducing microbial spoilage during the long process of ripening which takes more than a week. If the new findings are confirmed and accepted by the industry there could be a dramatic increase in the flavor quality of tomatoes consumed world over.

V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com

3D Printing-Will it change the face of food technology?

Though food is basically to serve the needs of the body in terms of calories and essential nutrients, macro as well as macro, man still craves for certain desirable features that has to be part of food he eats. While nutritionally balanced food will take care of health and body development, sensory features like color, shape texture and aroma make eating a pleasure. The oral cavity and the taste buds together decide whether food is readily accepted or not. Fortification and enrichment can take care of nutritional deficiencies caused by processing but sensory quality beyond what nature is providing in fresh foods can be achieved only through appropriate technologies developed from time to time. Taking a specific trait in foods like shape or texture extrusion technology can achieve a wide range of shapes and textures and advent of cooker extruder provided further scope in enhancing the appeal of processed foods very significantly. Now comes another innovation in the form of 3D printer technology which has tremendous potential to offer a variety of shapes to the food. Though this has vastly enhanced the capacity of food industry to diversify the product mix the question still remains whether this is going to be as exciting as expected. Here is a commentary on this new development.  

"We're watching a short video from MSN/CNN entitled, "3D Printing to Revolutionize the Food Industry". We disagree. The reporter briefly interviews a representative of Natural Machines, who make the Foodini food printer. It's a fascinating machine that can extrude a variety of food substances in desired shapes. But 3D Printing Will Not Revolutionize the Food Industry.  We're skeptical, at least until these questions have been resolved: Speed. 3D printing is very, very slow, which is not a good attribute when you're hungry. Imagine waiting for a print of your dinner for six hours? Certainly some dishes do take that long to prepare or longer, but remember the current slate of food printers do not cook the food, they merely arrange it for cooking, with the exception being certain items such as chocolate that can be immediately consumed. Speed is a critical element not only in consumer kitchens, but also in commercial kitchens.  Cost. 3D printers can cost more than your average kitchen appliance, although they are possibly affordable by commercial kitchens, so long as they can produce product with sufficient speed to be cost effective.  Materials. The range of materials usable by current food printers is quite limited, as are all current 3D printers. Worse, most food dishes are composed of many different food materials mixed together in useful and sometimes complex ways. This is not a capability available in current food printers." 

Why do skeptics feel that 3D technology will not have much impact on food industry? There are two reasons for this skepticism. First 3D technology is a slow one taking hours to produce a product and therefore has limitations in terms of mass manufacture, Second the product needs further processing like coking, baking or frying unlike cooker extruder. Competition comes from already established equipment range available to the industry at a lower cost and with high speed for getting any shape one wants These machines are versatile enough to give a much wider range of products including center filled products with various casings. They also need further processing after shape formation but their productivity can be very high to keep up with the demand. Where 3D printers have high potential is in making uniquely shaped plastic products suited for medical industry such as implants and others and in engineering industry for making precision spare parts. Still 3D technology cannot be ruled out altogether and further development in this area in future may make it still relevant to food industry.

V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com

FREEZE SHOCKING-A NEW TECHNOLOGY AGAINST FOOD BUGS

Man is always concerned about his survival and comfort while there are trillions of other living creatures who co-habit with him, struggling to share some of the very same food available in nature. It is true that as per Darwin's theory ( or was it that of Herbert Spencer?), fittest among the "animals" survive for long and probably man fits into the description of the "fittest" on earth, at least with intelligent resources far superior to others! But non-human living creatures are not about to give up and the most illustrative example is the group comprising microorganisms, some of which are slowly outpacing human beings in accessing foods for them selves, harming the latter in the process. The pathogenic molds, bacteria, virus and others cause a host of diseases through infecting the foods eaten by man and their toxins, both endogenic and exogenic are responsible to many illness and mortality during the last hundreds of years of human history. Ingenious as he is, man has been coming up continuously with newer weapons and tools to outsmart most of the pathogens and to day one should be proud of the achievements of scientists in this area of intense concern. To the armory of weapons that fight bugs, one more new technology is being added in the form of "superfreez" technology which is reported to have the capability to stun and destroy one of the most dangerous microbes encountered by the chicken industry, Campylobacter and here is report on the same. 

'FOOD safety experts plan to "superfreeze" chickens to halt the rise of campylobacter food poisoning. The Food Standards Agency is currently looking into a procedure which involves exposing the surface of slaughtered chickens to extreme cold, known as rapid surface chilling. The radical process is currently being considered to help curb the rampant levels of the food poisoning bacteria commonly found in uncooked poultry products. Around two-thirds of fresh, raw chicken sold by retailers is believed to be contaminated with campylobacter, which can cause sever stomach upsets. The FSA aims to reduce the proportion of birds in the highest category of contamination at UK poultry houses from 27 per cent to 10 per cent by 2015. Dr Jacqui McElhiney, policy adviser on food-borne disease at the FSA in Scotland, said: "This process acts to temporarily cool only the very outer surface of the chicken carcass without freezing the meat itself. It involves exposing the surface of poultry carcasses to very low temperatures for a very short time, which reduces the numbers of campylobacter bacteria on the surface, as they are sensitive to an extreme cold shock treatment of this type." The infection, known as a zoonose, a bacteria transmitted from animals to humans by consuming contaminated foodstuffs, has risen steadily in Europe in recent years. While levels of salmonella have significantly declined over the last five years, campylobacter infections have risen. In 2010 alone, numbers rose by 6.7 per cent, with 212,064 cases across Europe and 266 deaths. Although it performed well during trials, the "superfreezing" procedure has yet to be approved by the European Union and its legality is still to be determined, said McElhiney".

While one has to laud the feat of the scientists who developed this innovative simple technique, in absence of its approval by the competent safety management agencies in Europe or the US, there may be reluctance by the industry to adopt this technology on a wide scale. Probably the world seems to be too much obsessed with Salmonella and hence the relatively lower priority for Campylobacter threat perception. But if recent statistical figures about incidences of Campylobacter related food poisoning episodes are taken into consideration, it is a question of time before world will have to deal with the impending consequences of wide scale food poisoning due to Campylobacter infection. Sooner the new "superfreeze" technology is evaluated for its effectiveness and reliability in over coming this type of infection, better it will be for the chicken consumers around the world.

V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com