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Blanching Introduction

Blanching is a heat treatment process used to inactivate enzymes in fruits and vegetables prior to canning, freezing, and dehydration. It involves briefly scalding produce in boiling water or steam to stop enzymatic reactions, set color, and reduce microbial loads. The key aims are to prevent quality changes during storage like off-colors, off-flavors, and toughening from continued enzyme activity. Both under and over blanching can damage texture, flavor, color, vitamins and minerals. Determining the proper blanching time for different vegetables is important to maximize their physical characteristics during processing and storage.

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Haikal Iskandar
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562 views1 page

Blanching Introduction

Blanching is a heat treatment process used to inactivate enzymes in fruits and vegetables prior to canning, freezing, and dehydration. It involves briefly scalding produce in boiling water or steam to stop enzymatic reactions, set color, and reduce microbial loads. The key aims are to prevent quality changes during storage like off-colors, off-flavors, and toughening from continued enzyme activity. Both under and over blanching can damage texture, flavor, color, vitamins and minerals. Determining the proper blanching time for different vegetables is important to maximize their physical characteristics during processing and storage.

Uploaded by

Haikal Iskandar
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

INTRODUCTION

Blanching is an essential step of heat processing used for agricultural products. Fruits
and vegetables are blanched prior to canning, freezing and dehydration. The aims of blanching
are to inactivate the native enzymes and to destroy enzyme substrates such as peroxides to
reduce the microbial load in the food and raw material, to soften and shrink the food facilitating
the filling into containers expel cellular gases thereby reducing can corrosion and improve the
texture particularly of hydrated foods. Over blanching damages the texture of the product.

Blanching could be briefly described as the process of heating vegetables to a


temperature high enough to destroy enzymes present in the tissue. It stops the enzyme action,
sets the colour, and shortens the drying and dehydration time. It is usually carried out in hot
water or in steam, this technique is used by indigenous people to reduce or eliminate the
bitterness of the vegetables and acid components that are common in leaves (Oboh, G, 2016).

Blanching is the scalding of vegetables in boiling water or steam. Blanching slows or


stops the action of enzymes. Up until harvest time, enzymes cause vegetables to grow and
mature. If vegetables are not blanched, or blanching is not long enough, the enzymes continue
to be active during frozen storage causing off-colors, off-flavors and toughening. Blanching
time is crucial and varies with the vegetable and size of the pieces to be frozen. Under blanching
speeds up the activity of enzymes and is worse than no blanching. Over blanching causes loss
of flavor, color, vitamins and minerals.

OBJECTIVE

 Determine the blanching time of vegetables.


 Evaluate physical characteristic of blanched sample in terms of color, texture and odor.

Oboh, G. (2016). Effect of blanching on the antioxidant properties of some tropical green leafy
vegetables. LWT-Food Science and Technology, 38(5), 513-517.

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