ABSTRACT The effects of batter composition, thermal pretreatment and frying time on mass transfer during deep-fat frying were studied using response surface methodology. Prior to frying, dough composed of wheat and rice flour mixtures (wheat/rice ratio between 0 and 100%) mixed with water at ratio 1: 1.3 (mixture: water) were put in closed aluminum cells and preheated in a water bath at temperatures ranging from 60 to 90 C. Then, the samples were fried for 1, 2, 3 and 4 min.

Thermal and physical properties of Detarium microcarpum seed flour, were studied. Thermophysical properties such as apparent density, bulk density, porosity and water activity of dry ground powder of the sample were determined and found to be 1.79 g/cm3, 0.44 g/cm3, 75.51% and 0.549, respectively. The Brix of the aqueous solutions of the sample ranged from 1.45 to 4.00° Bx.

The effect of different concentrations of sugar solution (hypertonic) (30%, 45% and 60% w/v) and carboxyl methyl cellulose (CMC) (0%, 1% and 2% w/v) coating on freeze drying of apple slices was studied. In total, nine treatments with respect to concentrations of hypertonic solution and coating layer were prepared to analyze their influence on the physical and chemical properties of freeze dried apple slices. It was observed that increase in the sugar solution concentration, decreased the moisture content of the apple slices significantly impacting its water activity, texture and sugar gain. Application of different concentrations of CMC coating had no significant effect on the properties of dried apple slices. A significant change was observed for color of CMC coated freeze dried apple slices pretreated with 60% sugar solution. Drying kinetics of pretreated apple slices were fitted by using two drying models, Newton's and Page's. Page's model showed higher R-square and lower root mean square error (RSME) compared to Newton's model.

X-ray micro-computed tomography imaging technique was applied to study microstructural characteristics of deep-fat fried chicken nuggets. The results obtained showed a significant (P < 0.05) influence of frying conditions on microstructural properties of the deep-fat fried breaded chicken nuggets. The porosity of the breading coating increased while that of the core remained relatively unchanged with frying time. The number of pores also increased with frying. The chicken nuggets coating and core pores showed a decreased interconnectivity after frying. The shapes of the samples' pores were between rod-like and spherical structure. The pore size distribution for the coating and the core parts showed an increase in pores with diameter <100 mm in terms of volume and number count. Some correlations were observed between the sample's (coating and core) porosity and frying time, fat content and moisture loss.

The aim of this study was to characterize modified proso millet (Panicum miliaceum) starch in order to explore its prospect as an ingredient for food applications. The current study determined the effect of hydrothermal modification (HTM) at 30 g/100 g moisture level and acid modification (AM) with HCl on extracted proso millet starch physicochemical and functional properties. Amylose content reduces with AM while HTM showed negligible effect. HTM starch had higher water binding capacity (WBC) whereas AM starch showed reduction in WBC. Additionally, the solubility and swelling power of HTM starch decreased with increase in temperature, and in AM starch solubility increased sharply but swelling power increases at 80 °C but significantly (P<0.05) reduces at 90 °C. HTM caused increase in gelatinization temperature with a mean value of 87.17 °C compared to 78.61 °C in native starch. AM reduced onset (69.71 °C) and gelatinization temperature (77.26 °C), and it increased the range (26.56 °C) significantly (P <0.05) with no effect on ΔH G. Pasting profiles of native proso millet starch changed significantly (P <0.05) upon modifications and reduction in peak viscosity was observed in both modifications. AM reduced the holding strength, final viscosity, setback and breakdown whereas HTM reduced only breakdown and no change was observed in other parameters.

Incidence of codling moth (CM) (Cydia pomonella L.) infestation in apples has been a major concern in North America for decades. CM larvae bore deep into the fruit, making it unmarketable. An effective noninvasive method to detect larvae-infested apples is necessary to ensure that apples are CM-free in post-harvest processing. In this study, a novel approach using an acoustic emission (AE) system and subsequent machine learning methods was applied to classify larvaeinfested apples from intact apples. 'GoldRush' apples were infested with CM neonates and stored at the same conditions as intact apples. The AE system was used to collect the data emitted by 80 larvae-infested and intact apples in total. Eleven AE features that changed with signaling time were obtained with the AE system. For each feature, the area under the curve along the signaling time was calculated and used as an independent input variable for the machine learning algorithms, which included linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and ensemble method adaptive boosting. With signaling times ranging from 0.5 to 120 s, classification rates for infested versus intact apples ranged from 91% to 100% for the training set and from 83% to 100% for the test set. The quick signal collection and high classification accuracy obtained in this study show the potential of AE for detecting and classifying CM-infested apples.

The objective of this study was to develop and evaluate the physicochemical and functional properties of a bean like product made from cold extrusion of sorghum, soy and wheat flours. Formulated samples comprised of sorghum (25–70%), wheat (0–35%) and soy (30–50%) flours. The degree of gelatinization ranged from 54.1 to 93.6%. Pasting curves showed minimal starch damage with peak and final viscosities in the range of 456.0–1138.5 and 297–584 cP, respectively. Textural properties of the extrudates were significantly impacted by starch content and cooking time. There was significant cooking loss due to poor binding properties of the extrudates. Cooking the product for 30 min after 2 h soaking gave comparable hardness to cooked navy bean. Texture profile analysis showed that mostly starch-based ingredients contributed to hardness and cohesiveness, while formulations high in protein showed increased adhesiveness and gumminess. Practical Applications This study addressed a major gap in a...

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Imaging technique or computer vision (CV) technology has received huge attention as a rapid and non-destructive technique throughout the world for measuring quality attributes of agricultural products including meat and meat products. This study was conducted to test the ability of CV technology to predict the quality attributes of beef. Images were captured from longissimus dorsi muscle in beef at 24 h post-mortem. Traits evaluated were color value (L*, a*, b*), pH, drip loss, cooking loss, dry matter, moisture, crude protein, fat, ash, thiobarbituric acid reactive substance (TBARS), peroxide value (POV), free fatty acid (FFA), total coliform count (TCC), total viable count (TVC) and total yeast-mould count (TYMC). Images were analyzed using the Matlab software (R2015a). Different reference values were determined by physicochemical, proximate, biochemical and microbiological test. All determination were done in triplicate and the mean value was reported. Data analysis was carried o...

The drying behavior of plantain (Musa AAB) in a convective hot-air dryer at drying temperatures of 50, 60 and 70C (with blanching and soaking in salt solution as forms of pretreatment) was studied. The drying time reduced with increase in drying temperature and presence of pretreatment. The Page model gave a better fit when compared with the exponential, generalized exponential, logarithmic, Midilli-Kucuk and parabolic model. Effective moisture diffusivity values (Deff) varied from 2.86 to 5.4 × 10 −8 m 2 /s with the blanched samples having higher values. The lowest and highest activation energy (Ea) values were for blanched samples and untreated samples, respectively. The lowest and highest values for the total energy needed for each dryer condition and the energy required for drying 1 kg of plantain was from water blanched plantain dried at 70C and from untreated plantain dried at 50C, respectively. PRACTICAL APPLICATION Plantain is a seasonal and highly perishable crop indicating why stable and storable products, usually in the form of dried composite flour and chips, are made from the plantain fruit immediately after harvest to reduce postharvest losses. Plantain flour is considered to be a very important component of weaning foods in tropical developing countries. Drying, an integral part of its production, has been reported to have a significant effect on drying kinetics and quality of the dried product. Thus for efficient hot-air drying of plantain, part of the primary requirements is to understand the phenomena involved in the drying process, in order to be able to predict drying times and determine the influence of the use of pretreatments on the dehydration characteristics. The knowledge of the dehydration characteristics of plantain was then used in selection of an appropriate thin layer drying model.

In order to discourage the use of chemicals in raisin processing, the effect of microwave and pulsed electric field (PEF) pretreatments on the drying rate and other quality parameters like color, total soluble solids, bulk density, appearance, and market quality were compared with that of chemically pretreated raisins dried at 65 C. The untreated and pretreated samples had a statistically significant difference in drying rate (P < 0.05). The drying rate of chemically pretreated raisins was the highest when compared to others. The results showed that the PEF and microwave-treated samples had a significantly high Total Soluble Solids (TSS), along with good appearance and market quality.

This article discusses the automatic recognition of Cued Speech in French based on hidden Markov models (HMMs). Cued Speech is a visual mode which, by using hand shapes in different positions and in combination with lip patterns of speech, makes all the sounds of a spoken language clearly understandable to deaf people. The aim of Cued Speech is to overcome the problems of lipreading and thus enable deaf children and adults to understand spoken language completely. In the current study, the authors demonstrate that visible gestures are as discriminant as audible orofacial gestures. Phoneme recognition and isolated word recognition experiments have been conducted using data from a normal-hearing cuer. The results obtained were very promising, and the study has been extended by applying the proposed methods to a deaf cuer. The achieved results have not shown any significant differences compared to automatic Cued Speech recognition in a normal-hearing subject. In automatic recognition of Cued Speech, lip shape and gesture recognition are required. Moreover, the integration of the two modalities is of great importance. In this study, lip shape component is fused with hand component to realize Cued Speech recognition. Using concatenative feature fusion and multi-stream HMM decision fusion, vowel recognition, consonant recognition, and isolated word recognition experiments have been conducted. For vowel recognition, an 87.6\% vowel accuracy was obtained showing a 61\% relative improvement compared to the sole use of lip shape parameters. In the case of consonant recognition, a 78.9\% accuracy was obtained showing a 56\% relative improvement compared to the use of lip shape only. In addition to vowel and consonant recognition, a complete phoneme recognition experiment using concatenated feature vectors and Gaussian mixture model (GMM) discrimination was conducted, obtaining a 74.4\% phoneme accuracy. Isolated word recognition experiments in both normal-hearing and deaf subjects were also conducted providing a word accuracy of 94.9\% and 89\%, respectively. The obtained results were compared with those obtained using audio signal, and comparable accuracies were observed.

The objective of this study was to characterise the pore properties of deep-fat-fried chicken nuggets coating under different processing conditions namely frying temperatures (170, 180 and 190°C) and time (0-240 s) using porosimetry technique. Porosity range obtained was between 39.93 and 68.99%. Porosity of the freezedried samples decreased with frying time. The main effect of temperature on porosity was significant (P < 0.05). Porosity showed a high positive and negative correlation with moisture and fat contents, and the correlation coefficients ranged between 0.88 and 0.96 and 0.78 and 0.8, respectively. Bulk density increased with frying time, while apparent density was relatively the same. Pore distribution showed bimodality. There was no significant effect of temperature on pore size distribution. Over 70% of the pore volume is made up of pores greater than 1 lm. Pore volume ranged between 0.54 and 1.5 cm 3 g)1 , and it decreased with frying time. Mean pore diameter was between 0.006 and 389 lm, while with frying time, it ranged between 0.25 and 8.32 lm. Total pore area was between 2.53 and 16.53 m 2 g)1. Hysteresis phenomenon showed that some of the pores were not perfectly cylindrical in shape.

The effect of a microwave pretreatment at different time duration on the mass transfer of chicken nuggets during deep-fat frying was studied. Coated chicken nugget samples pretreated in a microwave oven for 1-2 min were fried at 160 C for times ranging from 0 to 300 s to evaluate the mass transfer as compared to the samples without a microwave pretreatment. Microwave pretreatment had a significant effect on moisture loss and oil uptake of chicken nuggets during deep-fat frying.

PurposeThis paper aims to focus on the prospects of incorporating a non‐thermal process (high intensity electric field pulses, HELP) into food processing and preservation methods in developing countries. Besides, it is to create awareness to food processors and motivate researchers in developing countries to generate more data on the technology.Design/methodology/approachThis is based on the review of the various successful applications of HELP process in inactivation of micro‐organisms for the purpose of preservation. The adaptability of the process to plant food processing was also reviewed. Potential areas of application in developing countries were also highlighted and discussed.FindingsThe present findings reveal possible applications of HELP to food processing in developing countries such as fermentation, fruit and vegetable processing, and dehydration of tropical food.Originality/valueThe paper has indicated that the poor energy system in developing countries has made drying ...

The effect of different concentrations of sugar solution (hypertonic) (30%, 45% and 60% w/v) and carboxyl methyl cellulose (CMC) (0%, 1% and 2% w/v) coating on freeze drying of apple slices was studied. In total, nine treatments with respect to concentrations of hypertonic solution and coating layer were prepared to analyze their influence on the physical and chemical properties of freeze dried apple slices. It was observed that increase in the sugar solution concentration, decreased the moisture content of the apple slices significantly impacting its water activity, texture and sugar gain. Application of different concentrations of CMC coating had no significant effect on the properties of dried apple slices. A significant change was observed for color of CMC coated freeze dried apple slices pretreated with 60% sugar solution. Drying kinetics of pretreated apple slices were fitted by using two drying models, Newton's and Page's. Page's model showed higher R-square and lower root mean square error (RSME) compared to Newton's model.

The degradation kinetics of ascorbic acid was determined in baobab drink during pasteurization and storage temperatures at 60-90°C for 3 hours and 0-40 o C for 5 weeks respectively. The loss of ascorbic acid at all temperatures followed the first order kinetic model as the coefficient of determination (i.e. R 2-value) ≥ 0.953. Rate constants of ascorbic acid degradation ranged from 9.72-26.31 x10-3 /minute and 5.266-29.95x10-3 /day during pasteurization and storage respectively. Decimal reduction time (D-value) and half-life ranged between