ABSTRACT
Introduction ........................................................................................................ 683
Materials and Methods ..................................................................................... 684
Results and Discussion ..................................................................................... 685
Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 687
References ........................................................................................................... 687
The glassy state is regularly observed in food (Blanshard and Lillford, 1993,
Simatos et al., 1994). Food is generally assumed to be stable in the glassy state
over a practical time scale. Recently, enthalpy relaxation of the glassy state
has been reported on food materials such as starch (Kim et al., 2003) and
sugars (Kawai et al., 2004). Kim et al. (2003) evaluated the water vapor
permeability of the thin layer of glassy starch after various aging times of the
film and showed that it decreased with increase in the aging time (Kim et al.,
2003). This suggests that quality change can happen in food even when it is
stored at temperatures below the T
. Although the enthalpy relaxation has
been widely referred in the field of polymer science in relation to the stability
of glassy state, there is much less data on the enthalpy relaxation of glassy
food materials.
