Pedro Fito - Böcker

This volume in the Food Preservation Technology Series presents the latest developments in the application of two solid-liquid operations, Osmotic Dehydration (OD) and Vacuum Impregnation (VI), to the food industry. An international group of experts report on the improvement of osmotic processes at atmospheric pressure for fruits and vegetables, current applications of vacuum impregnation and osmotic dehydration processes and their industrial significance for fruits and vegetables, and applications of atmospheric and vacuum salting treatments for cheese, fish, and meat processes.

This book is based on the papers presented at the first Ibero-American Conference on Food Engineering, held in Sao Paolo, Brazil in November 1995. Chapters focus on four major areas of current research in food engineering: new technologies; food packaging, physical properties of foods, and education in food engineering. Food engineers have contributed chapters on topics such as: minimally processed foods, structured foods, new developments in food packaging, and food engineering curricula for the 21st century.

The technical papers included in this book are based on the presentations made by the invited speakers of First Thero-American Conference on Food Engineering that was held at Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Sao Paulo, Brazil, from November 5-9,1995. This well attended meeting was organized to present recent advances and provide an adequate forum for developing a vision for future directions in food engineering education and research. In addition to the invited oral presentations, there were more than 300 volunteered contributions, most of these volunteered publications were published separately by the Valencia Polytechnic University. The first chapter of Food Engineering 2000, authored by Dr. Marcus Karel, deals with the history and future of food engineering. The following chapters, authored by an outstanding group of food engineers, focus on five major areas of current interest: physical properties of foods, new food processing technologies, modeling of food processing operations, food packaging, and food engineering education. The excellent quality of the Conference is clearly reflected in the articles included in this book. Some of them present the latest developments in a given field, while others effectively summarize the work done during the last few years.