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Blanching

 
(′blan·chiŋ)

(food engineering) A hot-water or steam direct-scalding treatment of raw foodstuffs of particulate type to inactivate enzymes which otherwise might cause quality deterioration, particularly of flavor, during processing or storage.


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Food and Nutrition: blanching
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A partial precooking by plunging the food into hot water (82-95 °C) for ½-5 min. Fruits and vegetables are blanched before canning, drying, or freezing, to soften the texture, remove air, denature enzymes that may cause spoilage when frozen, and remove undesirable flavours. Blanching is also performed to remove excess salt from preserved meat, and to aid the removal of skin, e.g. from almonds and tomatoes. There can be a loss of 10-20% of the sugars, salts, and protein, as well as some of the vitamins B1, B2, and niacin, and up to one third of the vitamin C.

Wikipedia: Blanching
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The first step in blanching green beans

Blanching (also spelled blenching) is a cooking term that describes a process of food preparation wherein the food substance, usually a vegetable or fruit, is plunged into boiling water, removed after a brief, timed interval, and finally plunged into iced water or placed under cold running water (shocked) to halt the cooking process.

When almonds or pistachios are blanched, the skin of the nut (botanically the seed coat surrounding the embryo) becomes softened by blanching and is later removed.

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References

  • Desrossier, NW, The technology of food preservation, The AVI Publishing Company, 1965, p. 150-151

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Copyrights:

Sci-Tech Dictionary. McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms. Copyright © 2003, 1994, 1989, 1984, 1978, 1976, 1974 by McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Food and Nutrition. A Dictionary of Food and Nutrition. Copyright © 1995, 2003, 2005 by A. E. Bender and D. A. Bender. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Blanching" Read more