Funded under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), Mission 4 Component 2 Investment 1.3, Theme 10.
Funded under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), Mission 4 Component 2 Investment 1.3, Theme 10.
Improvement of cooking technological approaches for innovative food pr...
Coordinator
Innovation of food (bio)processing using smart and mild technologies and fermentation to improve nutritional quality while ensuring safety and environmental sustainability throughout the shelf life of foods. Nutritional quality and biodiversity are targeted through both advanced and sustainable processes (including encapsulation) to preserve and improve at-risk (micro)nutrient composition of relevant food categories and exploiting microbiological and biotechnological applications to impact on nutritional quality. Such (bio)technological approaches (e.g., fermentation, enzyme treatments, etc.) are validated by process markers also directed to ensure food production safety and quality targeting new food habits (e.g., ready to eat food and novel food consumption) and sustainability, promoting production efficiency and utilisation of alternative sources (in connection with Spoke 2 and 3).
Development or improvement of at least 3 technological approaches to innovate food production (including cooking and shelf life) in terms of nutritional quality, safety, and sustainability (M24)
Plant-based food contains macro-, micro-nutrients and phytochemicals (e.g., phenolics) as well as meat provides a wide variety of nutrients such as essential amino acids, minerals (namely iron), vitamins. The consumption of fresh plant-based food and meat is usually hindered by some uncommon attributes but also dictated by human habits. Unfortunately, cooking methods might modify the quality of plant-based food but also produce some detrimental substances in meat. In plant-based food boiling can reduce the phytochemical content due to diacylation, glycosylation and enzyme denaturation, thus reducing the nutraceutical quality of plant-based food. With cooking, meat consumption is made safe and flavor, tenderness, juiciness are improved. However, depending on the types of cooking (boiling, steaming, grilling, frying) can be produced polyaromatic hydrocarbons, heterocyclic aromatic amines, and acrylamide, as well as products of lipid and protein oxidation.
The experimental plan will be structured with the following objectives and related methodologies:
All the samples will be further tested for their nutritional and nutraceutical properties and bioaccessibility and bioavailability in the Task 4.3.2.
