Presence of pesticide residues on fruits and vegetables is a serious safety issue for consumers. Efforts are being made to utilize drying technology to turn fruits and vegetables with high pesticide residues into dehydrated products with minimal or no pesticide residues are clearly conducive to ensuring safety and international fresh food commodity trade. This paper attempts to summarize the latest developments in drying technologies and pre-drying treatments for controlling pesticide residues in fruits and vegetables, with emphasis on sun-, oven-, freezing-, vacuum-, and microwave-drying technology, as well as non-thermal pretreatment methods such as ultrasound, non-thermal plasma (NTP), pulsed electric field (PEF), high hydrostatic pressure (HHP), and irradiation.
Basil was used as a source of flavor components and antioxidants to prepare new chicken powder products to improve flavor and shelf life. Microwave vacuum drying (MVD), radio frequency drying (RFD), and hot air drying (HAD) were used to compare the product characteristics and storage. GCMS, electronic nose, and electronic tongue were used to assess effect of three different drying methods on powder flavor and taste. The results showed that MVD basil chicken powder had the most abundant flavor. At the same time, MVD basil chicken powder also had good stability, the lowest hygroscopicity during storage period, followed by RFD and HAD. This was due to the change of the physical properties of samples and the secondary structure of protein. In addition, MVD had a convinced protective result on antioxidant components in basil chicken powder during storage period. The results showed that MVD had positive effects on maintaining the rich flavor, good physicochemical properties, and antioxidant activity of basil chicken powder during shelf life.
Deep-frying is the century-old and the most common cooking process which is still being used to prepare a variety of food products in industrial and domestic scales. Compared to other cooking processes, frying produces some distinctive flavor characteristics, but other undesirable and unacceptable characteristics to consumers are also originated during frying. Researchers have taken various technical approaches for reducing the oil content of fried products without compromising product quality. This review discusses some recently developed frying techniques which could improve the product quality, and advance frying efficiency, to save energy cost. Some modified method of alternative frying technologies used by the researchers are vacuum frying, microwave frying, microwave-assisted vacuum frying, radiant frying, ultrasound treated frying, air frying or their combinations. In this review, we aim to give a detailed insight into some specific aspects of new deep-frying practices and pretreatments for the quality maintenance of fried products highlighting their novelty and efficiency.
The relationship between credit risk and the pricing of local government bonds in China is explored in this paper. The pricing of local government bonds was found to reflect credit risk, but the risk premium was small. The type of bond (‘directional’ or ‘non-directional’) significantly affected pricing. Repayment source had no effect. The authors make recommendations for the central government, local governments and investors.
At present, X-ray imaging systems are employed to detect foreign objects in shielded packaged food products. An innovated method is researched in the paper to classify and to locate foreign objects based on matching by invariant moments. Feature vectors constructed by feature invariant moments extracted from template wavelet coefficient matrix were used for recognition and location of foreign objects in X-ray images. Matching between the normalized invariant moment vectors of target image and template images shows that this matching approach by invariant moments is precise and rapid in recognizing foreign objects in X-ray images of shielding-packaged food products.
The present study was undertaken to determine the effect of natural colorants and combination with select chemical products on anthocyanins, total phenolics (TPC) and total flavonoids content (TFC) of rose powder, and on the stability of anthocyanins (ACNs) during storage. Moreover, the color property of rose juice in holding period of 0-1hr at room temperature was also studied. Rose powder was mixed with three chemicals (citric CA; ascorbic AA; tartaric acid TTA) and natural colorants powder (Anthocyanin; Hibiscus; food-grade Vitamin-C) at different levels viz. 0.1%, 1%, 5% and 10% (w/w), respectively. AA addition at 1% retained the highest anthocyanins content among the chemical groups, while Hibiscus 1% addition resulted in the highest amount of anthocyanins retention (56.02 ± 1.86 mg/g, cyanidin 3- glucoside equivalent). In addition, the degradation rate of anthocyanins increased significantly with storage time and temperature except for 1% Hibiscus flowers at 25 °C. TPC of chemical additions showed no significant change in rose powder. However, natural colorant additions resulted in distinct TPC and TFC compared to the control sample except for Vitamin-C addition. All the additive-mixed samples exhibited a lighter color and lowered the redness value after a period of time.