The Complete Book on Fruits, Vegetables and Food Processing

Food processing is the transformation of raw ingredients into food, or of food into other forms. Food processing typically takes clean, harvested crops or butchered animal products and uses these to produce attractive, marketable and often long shelf-life food products. Benefits of food processing include toxin removal, preservation, easing marketing and distribution tasks, and increasing food consistency. In addition, it increases yearly availability of many foods, enables transportation of delicate perishable foods across long distances and makes many kinds of foods safe to eat by de-activating spoilage and pathogenic micro-organisms. Processed foods are usually less susceptible to early spoilage than fresh foods and are better suited for long distance transportation from the source to the consumer. The extremely varied modern diet is only truly possible on a wide scale because of food processing. Food Dehydration is a method of food preservation that works by removing water from the food, which inhibits the growth of microorganisms. The dehydration process has to check various parameters like heat-mass transfer, atmospheric pressure, equipments suitable for drying etc. to ensure suitable dehydration of food. Food processing techniques have to take measures on to maintain food safety and control risks and hazards associated with food processing. The book includes dehydration process of Onion, roasting of coffee beans, development process of Guava squash, preparation of fried potato chips, processing of rice, butter and margaraine, canning of chilies Plums, processing and preservation of jack fruit, characteristics of sweetened dahi, cereal grains, instant chutneys from pudina and gongura, starch isolated from potato tubers, coating of cashew kernel baby bits, ripening changes in mango fruits, mechanical and thermal properties of maize, storage of basmati rice under carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, effect of different varieties of soya bean on quality of paneer, analysis of menthol content in pan masala samples, preparation of dehydrated potato cubes, quality evaluation of raw dried mango slices khatai and mango powder amchur, packaging and storage of biscuits containing finger millet flour, storage effect on microbial safety of potato flour, processing and quality evaluation of ready-to-eat watermelon nectars etc. The book is highly recommended to new entrepreneurs, existing units who wants to get more information of processing of fruits and vegetables.