High Pressure, a Unique Tool for Food Texturization.

Abstract

High pressure is used to texturize food with two different strategies. The first strategy consists of using high pressure of several hundred MPa as a gelling agent per se to replace any other gelling or coagulating agents. In the second strategy, a moderate pressure of 100-300 MPa is used as a pretreatment to modify the food components properties in order to improve the efficiency of the traditional texturing treatment such as heat texturization, acid or rennet coagulation of milk, and so on. In both cases, pressure effects depend on many parameters such as the nature and the concentration of the macromolecules, the temperature of pressurization, the holding time and pressure, the pH, and the presence of additives. The behavior of real foods upon pressurization is even more complex compared to that of macromolecular model solutions due to their complex composition and, especially, to the presence of enzymes which are sometimes hardly affected by pressurization. Findings exposed in this article demonstrate that high-pressure technology is a unique tool to texturize food and provide products with unique properties.