CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

In this work shrinkage, heat transfer, quality index and their interactions during mushroom blanching were analyzed. Simple kinetics of mushroom shrinkage was developed and the final enzyme polyphenoloxidase activity in equivalent blanching processes were measured. Of this manner was determined the limiting factor to the processing time, at temperatures of the water bath between 50 and 90ºC. Furthermore, variation of quality parameters such as colour and texture were evaluated at the final processing time. A heat transfer model based on the finite element method was developed, using irregular domains and coupling with shrinkage. Cooking values were predicted from temperature simulations and correlated with quality index. The main result was that mushroom shrinkage was found to be the limiting factor to estimate the processing time to bath temperature higher than 60ºC; at lower bath temperatures the limiting factor appears to be the polyphenoloxidase activity. Quality index diminished with thermal treatment and texture measures were in good agreement with simulated cooking values.