Improving the quality and safety of frozen muscle foods by emerging freezing technologies: A review

ABSTRACTFreezing is one of the most widespread used preservation methods for meats including fish meat. Traditional freezing methods such as air blast freezing and cryogenic freezing could induce some quality deterioration such as damage to cell structure, increased drip loss, and poor sensory value. Therefore, novel freezing methods have been developed to minimize the disadvantages of traditional freezing methods. This review describes the enhancement of quality attributes of muscle tissues frozen by novel freezing technologies, including high pressure freezing, electrically and magnetically assisted freezing, ultrasound assisted freezing and antifreeze protein. These quality attributes include microstructure, moisture loss, color, tenderness, protein denaturation, lipid and protein oxidation, and microbial counts. In this review, the principles of these emerging freezing technologies are introduced, and the impacts of these technologies on controlling the formation and growth of ice crystals and on comp...