Effects of initial pore diameter on the oil absorption behavior of potato chips during frying process

Abstract

How initial pore diameter in materials affects oil absorption has been rarely studied up to now. Herein, we provided direct data evidence suggesting that the pore diameter prior to frying closely related to the oil absorption behavior. The pore had no significant effect on oil absorption of potato chips (p>0.05) when its diameter was 0.1 and 0.2 mm compared with the control. However, the oil absorption increased with the increasing of pore diameter when it was 0.3-1.2 mm. The oil absorption tended to be saturated at 0.9 mm pore diameter. In addition, we analyzed the moisture content, total oil (TO), surface oil (SO), penetrated surface oil (PSO) and structural oil (STO) contents of potato chips. The results when using palm oil showed that there was no significant difference in moisture, TO and STO contents of samples with pore diameter of 0.1 and 0.2 mm during the whole frying processing respectively compared with the control (p> 0.05). When pore diameter was 0.3-1.2 mm, STO and TO contents significantly increased with the rising of the diameter (p<0.05). The SO content and PSO content dropped as increasing in frying time for the samples with different pore diameters. The equilibrium TO content of samples with 0.3-0.9 mm pore significantly increased with the rising of pore diameter, which was about 6.2-22.5% higher than that of the control. And there was no significant difference in the equilibrium TO contents of both samples of 1.2 mm and 0.9 mm pore (p>0.05). STO fraction gave the greatest contribution to the increment of oil absorption.