Journal of Food Engineering最新文献

The study employed thin-layer models and sigmoid model to analyze the drying behavior and grinding kinetics of the Adzuki bean (AB) powder, respectively. Particle size distributions were determined using conventional sieving and a vibrator with image analysis, providing accurate measurements within a narrower size range (0.1 mm–3.0 mm) in the sample. The flow properties were evaluated across different particle sizes ranging from 0.25 mm to 2.00 mm. These flow characteristics were then utilized for designing a hopper. The study revealed that the smallest particle size (0.25 mm) exhibited the lowest flowability (1.7873 and 1.4384 for 10% and 15% moisture content (MC), respectively). Additionally, the internal friction angle varied significantly for particle sizes between 0.60 and 1.70 mm at 10% MC, while at 15% MC, a greater effect of friction due to moisture was observed. Furthermore, the study highlighted the need for a larger hopper angle and opening for the smallest particle sizes.

Industry-scale microfluidizer system (ISMS) was applied to superfine-grinding green peas at 30, 60, 90, 120 MPa for one pass, and 120 MPa for two passes to prepare whole component peas. The particle size distribution of whole component pea and the influence on starch, protein, and fiber in whole component peas was investigated. Particle size parameters including D_[4,3], D_[50] and D_[90] of whole component peas were reduced from 123.7, 119.0 and 269.0 μm to 33.9, 27.7 and 70.7 μm, respectively. Damaged starch content was greatly increased, and severe destruction of starch granules was observed by SEM morphology. The decrease in protein content and nitrogen element in the precipitate of ISMS-ground pea determined by Kjeldahl method and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy indicated that more pea proteins were converted into soluble form. Confocal laser scanning microscope analysis found that fluorescence of pea fibers became bright, and its dimensions were enlarged, which indicated that dense fibers were separated to structurally loose form. Comparison with modifying pea macromolecules by ISM, there were difference in the degree of starch damage, increase in protein solubility, and fiber destruction in ISMS-ground pea. These phenomena implied that the superfine grinding effect of ISMS on green pea was mainly achieved by changing macromolecule components.

Plant protein–polysaccharide composite hydrogels and emulsion gels are attractive materials for production of edible inks for 3D food printing. Their ability to satisfy the printability requirements is conventionally evaluated in small- and large-amplitude oscillatory shear tests. A model is derived that describes experimental data in linear and nonlinear rheological tests on protein gels in a unified manner. The model is based on the population-balance approach and involves a reasonably small number of adjustable parameters. Fitting observations on soy protein isolate–xanthan gum, peanut protein–gellan gum, peanut protein–carrageenan, pea protein–carrageenan and pea protein isolate–flaxseed gum gels demonstrates that material parameters evolve consistently with composition of the gels. The governing equations describe adequately the effects of pH and ionic strength of aqueous solutions on the mechanical properties of the gels and predict the stress–strain Lissajous curves and the crossover amplitudes for transition from the solid-like to fluid-like response. Based on the analysis of observations in large-amplitude oscillatory tests with various frequencies, a mechanism is proposed for transition from the type-I (strain thinning) to type-III (weak strain overshoot) response of protein–polysaccharide gels.

Astragalus is a common medicinal food that has many benefits for the human body. Some medicinal components in the astragalus would decompose or volatilize at high temperature. Therefore, vacuum drying at a low temperature is a common post-harvest processing for the astragalus. The components and the internal structure of the astragalus change along with the planting range and the harvest year. Therefore, only trained experts with years’ experience can adjust the vacuum drying parameters properly based on their aroma perception, which is backward in the industrial age. In this study, astragalus aroma in microwave vacuum drying was online measured with an electronic nose. Volatiles were verified with Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS) analysis. Drying temperature was PID controlled to maintain constant values. Microwave power was automatically regulated through a Triac circuit. Vacuum degree was adjusted instantly with a step motor. The physical and chemical quality changes of astragalus in drying process were investigated at various temperature and vacuum conditions. To optimize the drying effects, an Artificial Neural Network-based predictive control was designed to adjust the vacuum degree intelligently. The astragalus from Dingxi City, Gansu Province, China was conducted for experiments. By applying different control strategies, the astragalus quality was greatly improved, including more contents of total polysaccharides，astragaloside, total flavonoid, total saponin as well as the enhancement of beany flavor.

The objective of this work was to improve the drying of tomato juices after identifying the main parameters that are responsible for sticking during drying. Glass transition temperature (T_g) which is one of the key parameter, depends on the juice composition, mainly sugar. In order to reduce sugar, centrifugation was applied to the juices. T_g was determined by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) for freeze-dried tomato juice and tomato pellet conditioned at various water activity (a_w) (0.1–0.5). The glass transition curve showed that T_g decreased with increasing of the moisture. Comparison of powders obtained by juice and pellet from centrifugation shows that the T_g of freeze-dried pellets is higher than that of juice at equal a_w values. Adsorption isotherms of freeze-dried tomato juice and pellet were determined at 25 °C and a relative humidity (RH) of 0–98% using a dynamic technique. The data obtained were fitted to GAB model that best fitted the experimental data. The equilibrium moisture content (X) value of the freeze-dried pellets are lower and had the same value of 8% dry mass. X is lower because the pellet powders are less hygroscopic than tomato juice powders because of the reduction of soluble compounds by centrifugation, notably sugars. Reducing the product sugar content by centrifugation enables to raise T_g without using carriers and obtain less hygroscopic powders, which is advantageous for product storage.

The biochemical conversion mechanism of soybean residue by liquid-state fermentation with Auricularia auricula mycelium (AAM) was elucidated through the determination of enzymes and basic nutrients during fermentation as well as the metabolites analysis. The metabolomics analysis was conducted on the differential metabolites of A. auricula using LC-MS/MS and found a total of 351 differential metabolites, including organic acids, sugars, amino acids, phenols etc.; most of which were organic acids, and glycosides. All the differentially expressed compounds were analyzed by KEGG metabolic pathway enrichment. There were 30 metabolic pathways related to the metabolic mechanism of soybean residue conversion; among them, fatty acid synthesis, sugar metabolism, carbon synthesis, and the synthesis of various secondary metabolites were the main metabolic pathways. During the whole fermentation process, the content of flavonoids decreased gradually and its content was 0.001 mg/g after 15 days of fermentation. This indicated that AAM successfully fermented and transformed the soybean dregs into nutritionally rich products. As it was rich in high protein, 3D printing technology was utilized to develop a AAM protein-based cream substitute. The ink exhibited excellent 3D printability owing to its solid viscoelastic behavior. The ink rheology was controlled by XG concentrations, and 3D printed AAM protein emulsion with 2.0% XG showed printing stability. We also produced AAM protein-rich food products using traditional culinary processing techniques. It provided a theoretical basis for realizing the comprehensive utilization of soybean residue and can be used as a new protein source in the food industry with good application prospects.

In vitro protein and starch digestions in five sorghum-barley mixtures were investigated, revealing monophasic, and rapid-slow and slow-rapid multiphasic digestograms. The digestograms were adequately (r² > 0.93, p ≤ 0.001) modelled by the Sopade Objective Procedure (best for the starch digestograms), and multiterm exponential (best for the protein digestograms) and non-exponential equations. The mixtures varied in physicochemical and digestion properties, showing low sorghum digestibilities. The sorghum delayed pasting and increased anthocyanins to possibly inhibit the digestions. Towards better predicting in vitro protein digestibility, a hydrolysis index relative to casein (HI_PROTEIN) is presented and correlated (r² > 0.98, p ≤ 0.001) with the hydrolysis index for starch digestion (HI_STARCH) relative to white wheat bread. Using five published in vitro-in vivo protein digestibility data, a general equation (INVIVO_PROTEIN = 0.29 HI_PROTEIN + 61.89; r² = 0.960, p = 0.003) was obtained to, with the existing glycaemic-index-HI_STARCH equation, better understand food digestions.

Fine-grained food image recognition is an important research direction in the field of computer vision and machine learning. However, fine-grained food image recognition faces huge challenges when dealing with foods that vary greatly in shape but belong to the same category or subcategories of that food. To improve this problem, this paper proposes a deep convolution module for obtaining local enhanced feature representation and combines it with the global feature representation obtained from Swin Transformer for deep residual, to obtain a deeper enhanced feature representation. An end-to-end fine-grained food universal classifier was also proposed, which can more accurately extract effective feature information from enhanced feature representations and achieve accurate recognition. Our approach can accurately handle foods with widely different shapes but belonging to the same category and is expected to help people better manage their diet and improve their health. Our models were trained and verified on the public fine-grained food datasets Foodx-251 and UEC Food-256 respectively, where the accuracy of the method on the validation set is 81.07% and 82.77% respectively. Compared with other state-of-the-art self-supervised methods, the method proposed in this paper exhibits higher accuracy in fine-grained food image recognition tasks.

This study aimed to investigate the phase behavior of chitosan (Cs) - highland barley gliadin (HBG) complex and application in stabilizing Pickering emulsion. The turbidity results indicated that the insoluble complex was more likely to form between Cs and HBG at the higher concentration of HBG and NaCl (the optimal concentration ratio (1:40). The results of scanning electron microscope (SEM) and surface tension showed that the insoluble complex formed between Cs and HBG at pH 4.0 had better solubility and surface wettability. The results of isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC) indicated that each molecule of Cs could interact with 1, 2, and 7 HBG molecules under pH 2.5, 3.2, and 4.0, respectively. In addition, the Pickering emulsion stabilized by Cs-HBG complex showed great rheological properties, thermal stability and storage stability under the conditions of pH 4.0, concentration ratio (Cs:HBG) of 1:40, and oil fraction of 50%. These researches would contribute to the better utilization of polysaccharide-hydrophobic protein complex in the food and pharmaceutical fields.

In this study, the adsorption and inhibition of lipid oxidation propertises of curcumin embeded ovalbumin (OVA)/sodium carboxymethylcellulose (CMC) were investigated. The results demonstrated that the adsorption of curcumin and OVA/CMC particles at the oil-water interface might form a dual protection. The larger emulsion droplets were formed at an OVA/CMC ratio of 1:2 (pH 4.4) due to bridging flocculation. In the other two ratios (1:1, 2:1), the emulsions showed good stability after 32 days of storage. At the ratios of 1:2, 1:1, and 2:1, the oxidation rate of the oil in the emulsion stabilized by OVA/CMC and OVA/CMC-Cur particles reduced by 16.2% and 37.9%, 4.9% and 38.9%, and 8.8% and 35.8%, respectively, than the pure oil. At the ratios of 1:1 and 2:1, the emulsion stabilized by the OVA/CMC-Cur particles demonstrated excellent antioxidant resistance and storage stability, particularly at the ratio of 1:1.