ABSTRACT
Freezing and thawing are two significant food processing operations following each other in a process line. While freezing is one key unit operation for preservation, thawing is required for immediate consumption or further processing. Based on the final temperature of the product, tempering to final temperature of ≈−5°C to −2°C or thawing to ≈0°C or initial thawing temperature at the thermal centre are preferred approaches for a general defrosting. Thawing in still air and air blast thawing methods are considered to be the cheapest and oldest conventional methods with certain disadvantages involved, while microwave and radio frequency applications, with similar mechanism, are the innovative industrially applied approaches to increase the speed of thawing rate. The objective of this chapter is to demonstrate background on the use of conventional and innovative dielectric methods for thawing of frozen food products (seafood) and demonstrate the advantages and disadvantages of these methods with a computational approach.
