Recipient Organization
YESHIVA UNIVERSITY
500 W 185TH ST
New York,NY 10033
Performing Department
Chemistry and Biochemistry
Non Technical Summary
The proposed work seeks to advance frozen food manufacturing competitiveness to ensure a more sustainable, resilient, and nutritious food supply. Global trade of most meat products is distributed in the frozen state, and the U.S. exported $25.37 of beef, pork, and poultry products in 2022. The freezing process of meat products changes their structure, texture, and water-holding capacity, negatively affecting the product's quality and desirability.Understanding and controlling the freezing, storage, and thawing processes in frozen meats is essential to improve the quality of these products. Cryoprotectants (such as carbohydrates, proteins and other biocompatible compounds) can be used to improve the quality of frozen meats. However, poor understanding of the freezing process that occurs during the manufacturing of frozen meat products, and during the storage of these products has hindered quality improvements. This project will measure, quantify and explain the two main steps that drive the freezing process of beef products; 1) the formation of ice (termed ice nucleation), followed by 2) the growth of ice crystals. During storage of frozen beef, the size of ice crystals changes, which leads to damage to the product. This process is termed ice recrystallization, and molecular bioagents that minimize the damage are currently being developed and tested. However, the mechanisms through which cryoprotectants operate in solid food products are poorly understood. Current analytical methods are insufficient to fully understand the freezing process in frozen meats, resulting in influences on product quality.Our team's strategy is two-fold: 1) Using state-of-the-art Infra-red thermal imaging and cold stages, we will measure freezing rates inside beef products under different manufacturing conditions. The effect of various cryoprotectants on the freezing rates will be measured and we will rank these compounds based on their ability to control and limit ice growth rates. 2) Ice recrystallization rates and the post-thawed products' physicochemical, quality, and sensory properties will also be analyzed in parallel.This work allows us to bridge knowledge gaps in understanding the link between the fundamentals of ice crystallization and frozen beef's quality. The knowledge gained is vital for the eventual commercialization of novel freezing technologies and the development of novel ingredients (cryoprotectants) that can modulate ice formation and its growth, which will lead to the quality improvement of frozen meats.
Animal Health Component
30%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
50%
Applied
30%
Developmental
20%
Goals / Objectives
The major goals of this proposal is to understand and improve the freezing process (ice nucleation,ice growth) and storage (ice recrystallization) of frozen beef products.The research proposed here will lead to the improvement of manufacturing techniques of beef products by varying the freezing rates, storage temperatures, and the use of novel cryoprotectants that will eventually increase the competitiveness of U.S. food industry in the global marketplace.The objectives of this proposal is:To understand the freezing process of beef products by in-situ measurements of ice growth velocity and ice nucleation rates at various cooling rates.To test different cryoprotectants (ice nucleation proteins and antifreeze proteins) that affect ice nucleation/growth in beef products during the freezing process.To understand ice recrystallization in beef products as affected by different manufacturing conditions and cryoprotectants.To identify the relationship between water crystallization and product quality and to ultimately develop better manufacturing processes for the beef products.
Project Methods
The proposed research plan uses a combination of unique and home-developed methods including cold-stages, AFPs and Infra-red (IR) cameras. Drori has built cold-stages that allow for the formation and growth of single ice crystals sized 10-30 microns. The temperature stability and resolution are ±0.001 °C, which is crucial for controlling the growth of small ice crystals. It is important to note that these systems are at the cutting-edge in the field of microscope-mounted cold stages. Using funds awarded by NIFA's seed grant, the Drori lab purchased an advanced IR thermal camera, and a cold stage was built to control the temperature of the sample. This system is capable of measuring ice crystals at 100-200 µm, and its temperature resolution is 0.03 °C. First, the system was calibrated using ice crystals growing in pure water. These experiments exhibited the high spatial resolution of the camera (crystal diameter of 500 µm) and demonstrated the working principle that the IR camera can capture and quantify the heat signature released from ice growth or absorbed by ice melting. Next, whole plant leaves were used to test the ability of the system to capture ice nucleation inside a biological sample. The plant cell froze within 0.53 seconds, and the latent heat of crystallization (~1 °C) has dissipated and captured by the IR camera. This proof-of-concept experiment shows that this system can capture freezing events on the micrometer scale. The Drori lab also designed and built a new system, dedicated to ice nucleation measurements called Food Ice Nucleation Assay (FINA). This system includes a custom-made cold stage that is controlled by a PC program and a thermal camera. The system has been used for the last few months and is able to measure nucleation rates in various food products. The advantage of this system over the previously described system is its low price and its simplicity, which will allow undergraduate students to run experiments and analyze the data on their own.The Wu lab has a cooling stage, two cabinet freezers, and a microscope that will be used to study ice recrystallization during the freezing, storage, and thawing stages. The cooling stage is a thermoelectric (Peltier) - based stage that can provide cooling to -40 °C without using liquid nitrogen with a temperature resolution of ±0.01 ? and a minimum heating/cooling rate of 0.01 ? per minute. The 45-01A cabinet freezers are designed for long time freezing-thawing experiments with the lowest temperature of -45? and programmable temperature control. The BX51 polarized microscope with a built-in digital camera will be used to measure the size of ice crystals for ice recrystallization.