نشریه پژوهش های علوم و صنایع غذایی ایران
سال شانزدهم شماره 3 (پیاپی 63، امرداد و شهریور 1399)

The orange samples were cut into slices with a thickness of 4 mm and treated with ohmic method for 3, 5, and 7 min as ohmic pre-treatment in three voltages 30, 50 and 70 V. Then, they were dried in three replicates using a microwave dryer and at three powers of 90, 360, and 900 W. The statistical analysis results showed that the ohmic time, ohmic voltage and microwave power are significant for the energy and exergy efficiency and specific energy and exergy loss at 1% level. The highest energy and exergy efficiency was observed at 900 W and in the ohmic time of 7 min. The highest energy and exergy efficiency was observed at 59.041% and 47.76%, respectively. The maximum energy loss was seen at 90 W and ohmic time of 3 min. The microwave power, ohmic time, and ohmic voltage were statistically significant for all the parameters (energy and exergy) such that with increasing them, the energy and exergy efficiency increased, while the specific exergy and energy loss decreased.

In this study, the effect of thermal treatments (roasting and autoclave) and non-thermal treatments (soaking and germination) on total phenolic content, total flavonoid content, antioxidant activity and bioavailability of minerals of chia seed was evaluated. Results showed thermal treatments increased the total phenolic content in samples such that the total phenolic content increased from 0.95± 0.1 mg (GAE/g) (control sample) to1.32± 0.12 mg (GAE/g) (roasted sample) and 1.11± 0.1 mg (GAE/g) (autoclaved sample). Soaking reduced the total phenolic content in samples while germination increased the amount of total phenolic content in the samples. Using the roasting treatment had no significant impact on the total flavonoid content of samples, while using the autoclave, soaking and germination treatments reduced the total flavonoid content of samples. Roasting and autoclaving increased the antioxidant activity of samples while soaking reduces the amount of antioxidant activity among the samples and germination had no considerable effect on the antioxidant activity of samples. Moreover, germination treatment increased the macro and micro elements of minerals in samples. Thermal treatment (roasting) had no significant impact on the amount of minerals and only increased the Fe2+ in samples. FTIR Spectra showed thermal treatment reduced the amount of polysaccharide (1740 -1750 cm-1) and protein /lipid (2800-3000 cm-1) in samples.

In this study, the functionality of Althaea officinalis mucilage (AOM) on cupcake quality and its potential use in retarding the staling process have been studied. For this purpose, the effects of different concentrations of AOM (0, 0.25, 0.5, and 1%) on some physical properties such as hardness and color and the sensory properties of cupcakes and their batter were determined. In general, the overall properties of cupcake were notably influenced by mucilage addition. The results demonstrated that the mucilage addition significantly (p<0.05) improved physical properties of cupcakes (moisture content, specific volume, and batter density and viscosity) compared with the control sample. Hardness during storage decreased significantly with the addition of mucilage. The results from the comparison of means for the color parameter, indicated that the lowest L* value and the highest L* of crust belonged to the control sample and those that featured 0.25 and 1% mucilage, respectively. The cakes with 0.75 and 1% mucilage obtained the highest scores of sensory analyses.

The aim of the current research was to identify and develop an ideal delivery system in order to protect the vitamin from gastrointestinal conditions. For this purpose, vitamin loaded Alginate-Whey protein micro gels (AL-WPC MGs) developed as a biopolymer carrier. This microcapsule was examined in terms of morphology, ζ-potential particle size and distribution, encapsulation and delivery efficiency, and in vitro gastric and intestinal digestions. Absorbance method was used to monitor B-complex vitamins release over time at the simulated gastrointestinal conditions. Release experiments illustrated beneficial attributes for these microspheres. Release mechanism was predicted by using various kinetic equations. Results indicated that the most of the fabricated spherical shaped AL-WPC MGs was under 100 μm in size, and these microcapsules had an excellent and moderate stability in gastric and intestinal conditions, respectively. It was found that the highest vitamin release rate occurs in the simulated gastric-intestinal situation, and type of the vitamin had a slight effect on the release rate and release profile. Kinetic models suggested that release from group B vitamins mainly was controlled by Fickian diffusion mechanism. In general, this research showed that the AL-WPC MGs protect the vitamin from gastric digestion and could be used as a delivery system. In previous works, a  novel AL-WP MGs and use for different active agent encapsulation was developed, while the final purpose of this work was to study the vitamin release mechanism from AL-WPC MGs at the gastro–intestinal situation. Accordingly, this microcapsule showed the highest vitamin release rate at the simulated intestinal situation. This high release could be due to instability of alginate in neutral pH, and also enzymatic digestion of whey protein. The better release of vitamin at intestinal condition is desirable to achieve the nutrient effect during food consumption. This micro gel therefore appears to be potentially beneficial as digestion delivery vehicles for bioactive compounds in the food and nutraceuticals industry as well as non-food industry.

Impact of microwave-grill -drying (MWGD) at different powers (300, 450 and 600 Watts) on functional properties of berry "Russian olive" was investigated. The effect of microwave’s water and oil holding capacities, gelation, foaming and emulsifying, which will provide novel and applicable knowledge for the food industry, was determined. We specifically focused the kinetics drying. By increasing microwave -grill powers (300–600W), drying time decreased from 270 to 120 s. For dried Russain olive berry at each applied microwave-grill power, water holding capacity values were higher than oil holding capacity values. However, drying at 450W is the best method of retention of functional properties of fresh fruit of E.angustifolia L.

This research was aimed to study the effects of loading force and storage period on the physiological characteristic of pears. In this experiment, the pears were subjected to quasi-static loading (wide-edge and thin-edge) and different storage periods (5, 10 and 15 days). The amounts of the fruits’ total phenol, antioxidant and vitamin C contents were evaluated after each storage period. In the present study, multilayer perceptron (MLP) artificial neural network featuring a hidden layer and two activating functions (hyperbolic tangent-sigmoid) and a total number of 5 and 10 neurons in each layer were selected for the loading force and storage period so that the amounts of the total phenol, antioxidants and vitamin C contents of the fruits could be forecasted. According to the obtained results, the highest R2 rates for thin-edge and wide-edge loading in a network with 10 neurons in the hidden layer and a sigmoid activation function were obtained for total phenol content( =0.9539- =0.9865), antioxidant ( =0.9839- =0.9649) and vitamin C ( =0.9758); as for wide-edge loading in a network with 5 neurons in the hidden layer and hyperbolic tangent activation function,  the highest R2 rate of vitamin C content was obtained equal to =0.9865. According to the obtained results, the neural network with these two activation functions possesses an appropriate ability in overlapping and predicting the simulated data based on real data.