ABSTRACT
There is a food market tendency for more convenient, fresher, less heavily processed (e.g., processed with less heat), more natural, and healthier products. This can be achieved with minimal processing methods that preserve food but also retain to a greater extent their nutritional quality and sensory characteristics by reducing the reliance on heat as the main preservation action. Traditionally, fermented foods have many of these characteristics; irradiation has been adopted in some countries as a minimal method of food preservation, and chilling together with controlled or modi-ed atmosphere are now the more widely adopted methods to suppress microbial growth. But there has also been an increasing interest in developing other combinations of existing and novel methods to achieve mild preservation. And currently, nonthermal food-processing techniques are regarded with special interest by the food industry. Among nonthermal techniques, high-pressure processing, also described as high hydrostatic pressure, or ultra-high-pressure processing, has been recently introduced in some food sectors.
