EFICIÊNCIA DO PROCESSAMENTO TÉRMICO Sous Vide EM BRÓCOLIS (Brassica oleracea) TRATADOS COM COLETO DE CÁLCIO

Abstract

The ready-to-eat food trend has increased due to changes in the population lifestyle in big cities, thus, requiring the use of processing techniques that need to be practical, convenience, and healthy. Keeping the chemical, microbiological, and nutritional properties in foods from plant origin has been a challenge, since, after the harvest, biological, chemical, and physical reactions can occur and can affect their quality. In addition, concerns about the methods used for conservation in food industrialization has been increasing. Thus, the use of technologies that result in lower losses in quality in the processed foods conservation is important. Among the emerging technologies, there is the sous vide method, which is a preservation system of food packaged under vacuum and cooked at a temperature between 65oC and 95oC, aiming at keeping freshness, vitamins, flavor, color, and texture, increasing the shelf life. This procedure results in a quality food, eliminating the risks of microbial contamination, due to the fact that they are processed in the final packaging. This paper aimed to evaluate the efficiency of thermal processing, using the sous vide technique in broccoli previously treated with calcium chloride. After preparation, broccoli was treated with calcium chloride solution in different concentrations and wrapped in heat-shrinkable package, processed by the sous vide system under 90°C, at 0, 10, 20, 30, and 40 min, and stored under refrigeration. Physical and chemical parameters of firmness, pH, titratable acidity (TTA), total soluble solid (TSS), water activity (WA), color, mass loss, vitamin C, chlorophyll, and microbiological parameters were analyzed. Firmness results were analyzed and the treatment that showed the best results was submitted to the shelf-life study with the measurements of microbiological, physical, chemical, and nutritional parameters. It was possible to find that the treatment containing 3% CaCl2, added to the heat treatment by the sous vide system with 20 min of cooking time was the most appropriate in preserving firmness to acceptable levels of consumption. In 20 days of storage, the firmness showed a slight decrease that remained until the end of the experiment. It can be conclude that the sous vide system was efficient in keeping nutritional and microbiological quality in broccoli previously treated with calcium chloride, which shows the efficiency in the use of combined conservation methods.