Soybean food processing, deteriorative

Deteriorative Changes of Proteins During Soybean Food Processing and Their Use in Foods... 

Flavor is one of the major characteristics that restricts the use of legume flours and proteins in foods. Processing of soybeans, peas and other legumes often results in a wide variety of volatile compounds that contribute flavor notes, such as grassy, beany and rancid flavors. Many of the objectionable flavors come from oxidative deterioration of the unsaturated lipids. The lipoxygenase-catalyzed conversion of unsaturated fatty acids to hydroperoxides, followed by their degradation to volatile and non-volatile compounds, has been identified as one of the important sources of flavor and aroma components of fruits and vegetables. An enzyme-active system, such as raw pea flour, may have most of the necessary enzymes to produce short chain carbonyl compounds. 

Deterioration of the physical properties of proteins during food processing or food storage can be ascribed primarily to an irreversible insolubilization of proteins. However, a deteriorative change for one purpose can be a favorable one for another purpose. In Japan, for instance, the irreversible insolubilization of soybean proteins has been utilized effectively for production of soybean protein foods, such as tofu, kori-tofu, and yuba. 

Sensory evaluation is a specialized discipline, using trained panels to measure and analyse the characteristics of food lipids evoked by the senses of taste, smell, sight and mouth feel. Sensory analyses are those most closely associated with the quality of food lipids, but their usefiilness is limited because they are costly and require a well-trained taste and odor panel and the proper facilities. However, sensory analyses provide sometimes ausefiil approach to identifying flavor or odor defects in the processing of food lipids that caimot be detected by other more objective chemical or instrumental analyses. For example, certain flavor defects characterized as grassy or fishy in linolenate-containing oils such as soybean and low-erucic rapeseed (canola) oils (Chapter 1) occur at such low levels of oxidation that they can only be detected by sensory analyses. The old term flavor reversion for soybean oil is based on the characteristic of this oil undergoing flavor deterioration at unusually low levels of oxidation that cannot be measured by peroxide value determination. Oils derived from fish... 

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