Pulsed electric field treatment for fruit and vegetable processing

Abstract

Pulsed electric field (PEF) is a novel technique able to permeabilize cells presented in fruit and vegetable tissues without an important increase of the product temperature and avoiding an excessive deterioration of the tissue. This chapter summarizes the fundamentals of this interesting technology and its main applications in vegetable and fruit processing. PEF has been proposed for enhancing or assisting different processing operations, such as solid-liquid extraction (e.g., extraction of ingredients, winemaking, sucrose extraction, food waste and by-product revalorization), mechanical extraction (e.g., juice expression, mechanical oil extraction), cutting/ slicing (e.g., potato snack production), dehydration (e.g., hot air drying, osmotic dehydration, freeze-drying), freezing, or peeling. From a general point of view, benefits of PEF can be summarized in (1) improve process yield, (2) increase process velocity, (3) improve food quality (e.g., reduce fat uptake, reduce impact on sensory properties, increase health-related compounds), (4) decrease the intensity of other processing variables (e.g., temperature, grinding degree), and/or (5) increase the cost efficiency of the operation (e.g., reduce energy consumption). Although some PEF applications have been scaled up to pilot-industrial necessities, only a few have been tested in a real production environment or are used nowadays at industrial level, such as the PEF pretreatment of potato in snack production. In most cases, further research and development activities are still required to understand, optimize, and scale up these complex processes to unleash their full potential.