ABSTRACT
Food preservation is the most important of the food processing technologies and aims prolonging the shelf life of food products and maintaining their quality in terms of color, texture, and flavor. Research on food preservation technologies usually focuses on one of two aspects: the selection of process conditions to minimize product quality loss or the development of engineering design methodologies to ensure that the required process conditions can be achieved at low cost. Many of the existing methods, and probably most of those to be developed in the future, involve a combination of existing techniques such as freeze-drying, dehydro-freezing, dehydro-canning, pasteurization and pickling, irradiation, and heat preservation. Heat sterilization is a thermal process used widely in food preservation and involves the controlled use of heat to increase or decrease the rates of biochemical and/or microorganism reactions in the products. Chilling is a cooling process which is applied to food products.
