Flavor components, precursors, formation mechanisms, production and characterization methods: garlic, onion, and chili pepper flavors

Abstract

There is an enormous demand in the food industry to shift toward natural flavors. However, most flavor molecules are significantly unstable outside their original sources. Moreover, limited studies are focused on the flavor formation mechanisms, regeneration methods, and stability, which could help facilitate this replacement by establishing a link between food processing conditions and flavor generation.

This scoping review summarizes major findings related to the identification of garlic, onion, and chili pepper flavors and their precursor molecules, formation mechanisms, generation of flavors and precursors, characterization methods, and precursor stability under thermal food processing conditions. The findings confirmed that the allium flavors could be generated by alliin and isoalliin precursors through thermal processing. Also, the literature lacks detailed knowledge about chili pepper flavor’s precursors, and only capsaicinoids have been reported as a thermally stable chili pepper flavor.

Although numerous studies have focused on this area, there is still a lack of detailed applicable knowledge. Future investigations can be framed into (1) Development of efficient methods to generate flavors during food processing; (2) Improvement of flavors’ stability; (3) Understanding the interactions of flavors and their precursors with other food ingredients and additives; and (4) Characterization of the organoleptic properties of flavors.

Keywords:

• Plant-based flavor
• flavor precursors
• thermal processing
• alliin
• isoalliin
• capsaicinoids

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the support received from the Cornell University Mann Library team, especially Kate Ghezzi-Kopel, helping us to perform the scoping review.

Author contributions

Jieying Li and Younas Dadmohammadi searched, collected, compiled, and wrote the manuscript. Alireza Abbaspourrad supervised and guided the work. All authors were responsible for the idealization and read and approved the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.