ABSTRACT
Salting fish is both a method of preserving and a preliminary operation to some smoking, drying, and marinating processes. Bachalao, salted cod, is a popular traditional food in Mediterranean cuisine, and about 10% of the world production is salted after its capture. In both the salting and desalting processes, diffusion is the major mass transfer mechanism responsible for sodium chloride transport, and it is well known that diffusional mechanisms are quite slow. It was shown that the application of vacuum impregnation accelerated the mass transfer phenomenon in porous solid-liquid systems as is the case of cod/brine and cod/water in salting and desalting processes. The process yield was higher for the Spanish cod and practically independent of the desalting method. The vacuum desalting method was more efficient in the case of Norwegian cod and affected both the kinetic and the process yield.
