Lab report: food dehydration. This experiment focuses on the follow four questions: 1, to calculate the moisture contents on the dry basis of carrot and potato samples; 2, to assess the possible influence of pre-dehydration such as blanching on the qua

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Lab report: food dehydration

1. Introduction

In food preservation, dehydration is a common used approach. It is one of the oldest but also a simple and safe way to preserve food. It is process to remove moisture or water away from food. In a low moisture environment, yeast, bacteria and mold cannot grow (Andress and Harrison, 2006). Therefore, dehydration is helpful to minimize the growth of microorganism that is a major reason of food deterioration. At the meantime, drying also reduces the activity of enzymes that cause degradation of some nutrients. For fruit and vegetables that contain high level of water, they can go bad easily if inappropriate storage approach is applied. It was estimated 25-30% of total fruits and vegetable produced is wasted due to spoilage (Ramaswamy and Marcotte, 2006). Furthermore, dehydrated food is usually smaller and lighter and thus is convenient to transfer or store.

There are several ways to achieve dehydration in industrial production, such as heat, dry air, air movement, in the sun, in the oven and using a food dehydrator (Ramaswamy and Marcotte, 2006). For some kinds of food, pretreatment such as blanching is required. Blanching which is a