ABSTRACT
Food preservation technologies aim at hindering processes that cause either microbiological spoilage or/and deterioration of quality attributes of food products. Freezing and chilling are considered as ideal food preservation techniques to produce safe and nutritious foods of superior quality, with extended shelf life. Refrigeration technology is a more integrated sector, including not only initial chilling and freezing, but also cold storage, distribution, transport, retail display and domestic storage. Dehydrofreezing is a well-established commercial method to reduce cost of shipping, handling, and storage of fruits and vegetables and it consists of freezing a partially dehydrated food. Supercooling of several foods with application of an external electric field is studied and the preliminary results seem really promising regarding the area of improvement of the size of ice crystals. The hydrofluidization freezing is actually a type of immersion freezing and was suggested and patented to combine the advantages of both air fluidization and immersion food-freezing techniques.
