The impact of cooking methods on the physical, sensory, and nutritional quality of fish

Abstract

This review aims to provide a better understanding on different cooking methods and their effects on the safety and quality on the fish. Each cooking method offers different desired properties and negative impact to the fish in terms of nutritional composition, sensory quality, lipid oxidation, and microbiological aspect. Several cooking techniques had a long history of preparing fish with desirable taste and flavour such as steaming, boiling, smoking, and traditional frying. Recent years, new emerging cooking techniques such as air frying, microwave cooking, sous vide, mild oven cooking, and ohmic thermal cooking had also been explored for fish cooking. These techniques had been developed with the intention to improve the nutritional quality of the food through advanced technology in reducing heating temperature and cooking duration to as low as 50 °C and 10 s. These allow the preservation of nutrients, while reducing undesirable compounds such as acrylamide and other oxidative compounds. Besides that, the sensory quality and stability of the cooked fish may also improve from the low occurrence of lipid oxidation. Nevertheless, more studies are required for the use of emerging cooking techniques on fish. This review provides insight into the impact of different parameters used in different cooking methods on the quality and safety of different fish species. The need for optimization of the parameters for different cooking techniques was also emphasized. More innovative cooking techniques that is environmental friendly with higher energy efficiency should be explored for fish cooking to improve sustainability.