principle 4

4.      Reduction in physical defects

   Besides other factors foods can be contaminated by physical and physiochemical interactions. These interactions can be occurred during food handling, manufacturing and storage. There is no perfect rule to produce a food processing system that could be completely free from defects but using systematic techniques and full care these defects can be minimized.

·      Surface drying

The foods that are selected for frozen storage, should free from any type of water or desiccated before storage and is controlled by adequate packaging and storage temperature. In refrigerated storage of flesh foods, moisture control and surface drying can be minimized by maintaining higher than conventional average humidity in the storage chamber. The increase in microbial activity induced by such high relative humidity is kept under check by the use of ultraviolet lamp as storage atmosphere sterilants.

·      Crystallization

Another physical defect is crystallization of sugar from syrup and other syrup based products. The crystallized sugar in such products presents a sandy texture. This crystallization of sugar can be prevented by using a mixture of sugars instead of single sugar. A solution containing above 60% sucrose at room temperature will produces crystals, whereas a solution containing 75% of total sugars made up of a blend of different sugars like sucrose, glucose, and fructose will show no signs of crystals. This knowledge is applied in the production of high sugar products like jams, jellies and marmalades.