Estimation of surface temperature and thermal load in short-time heat treatment of surimi through reflectance spectroscopy and heat transfer modeling

Abstract Documentation of surface temperature is challenging for short food surface pasteurization treatments, particularly in steam environments. In this study a spectroscopic approach is investigated for estimating thermal load while heat transfer modeling is used to estimate the surface temperature of a model fish product when heated in steam or immersed in water. Reflectance spectroscopic measurements show that visible spectroscopy (400–550 nm) has potential for assessing the thermal load of surimi heated in water in the temperature range between 70 and 95 °C. For treatment times >10 s, robust models ( r 2  ⩾ 0.9) with acceptable prediction errors (