Improving the quality and safety of frozen muscle foods by emerging freezing technologies: A review

ABSTRACT

Freezing is one of the most widespread used preservation methods for meats including fish meat. Traditional freezing methods such as air blast freezing and cryogenic freezing could induce some quality deterioration such as damage to cell structure, increased drip loss, and poor sensory value. Therefore, novel freezing methods have been developed to minimize the disadvantages of traditional freezing methods. This review describes the enhancement of quality attributes of muscle tissues frozen by novel freezing technologies, including high pressure freezing, electrically and magnetically assisted freezing, ultrasound assisted freezing and antifreeze protein. These quality attributes include microstructure, moisture loss, color, tenderness, protein denaturation, lipid and protein oxidation, and microbial counts. In this review, the principles of these emerging freezing technologies are introduced, and the impacts of these technologies on controlling the formation and growth of ice crystals and on complex changes of protein are also discussed. The current review shows that the novel freezing methods have positive effects on promoting the quality of frozen muscle. At a micro level, the majority of the novel methods have some certain ability on controlling the formation and growth of ice crystals, thus creating smaller, and more homogeneous and regular distribution of ice crystals, leading to better microstructure and enhanced quality attributes of frozen meats. Meanwhile, complex changes of protein take place under some of these novel freezing processes, and therefore the possible negative effect of the changes of protein should also be considered for commercial applications of these technologies in the frozen food industry.

KEYWORDS:

• Freezing
• physical-chemical parameters
• meat
• fish
• ice crystals
• denaturation of proteins

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the International S&T Cooperation Program of China (2015DFA71150) for its support. This research was also supported by the Collaborative Innovation Major Special Projects of Guangzhou City (201508020097, 201604020007, 201604020057), the Guangdong Provincial Science and Technology Plan Projects (2015A020209016, 2016A040403040), the Key Projects of Administration of Ocean and Fisheries of Guangdong Province (A201401C04), the National Key Technologies R&D Program (2015BAD19B03), the International and Hong Kong – Macau – Taiwan Collaborative Innovation Platform of Guangdong Province on Intelligent Food Quality Control and Process Technology & Equipment (2015KGJHZ001), the Guangdong Provincial R & D Centre for the Modern Agricultural Industry on Non-destructive Detection and Intensive Processing of Agricultural Products and the Common Technical Innovation Team of Guangdong Province on Preservation and Logistics of Agricultural Products (2016LM2154).