Ways to Process and Preserve Food
Food processing is a method or process to transform raw food into well-cooked and preserved food for humans and animals. These approaches are used by the food processing industry to provide processed or canned food for our daily needs. The food processing industry uses the highest quality fresh ingredients to produce food solutions that are healthy enough and easy to cook. Below are some of the methods and techniques used to transform food into processed or preserved foods.
Freezing
This is probably the most widely used technique in the world today for preserving or processing food in both the domestic and commercial sectors. Some people find freezing food in glass jars the best way to preserve food. Simultaneously, others are carried out in large cold rooms that could store large quantities of food reused in some organic disasters.
A very wide range of products could be frozen to preserve and process some that do not need frozen in their normal state. For example, chips and wafers should be frozen, while potatoes should not be frozen. This is one of the first method that come into peoples mind when preserving food.
Smoking
Many foods such as fish, poultry, and many others are processed, stored, and flavored with smoke, usually in large smokehouses. This practice is quite simple, as mixing the smoke with the stored raw food and the smell of the hydrocarbons produced during smoking refines the food and makes it more palatable.
Vacuum Packs
This technique consists of packaging food in airtight bottles and bags in vacuum packs. This method is used in food processing because the airtight environment does not provide the oxygen that germs, especially bacteria, need to survive. This prevents the food from rotting. This method is very popular to obtain processed dried fruit.
Sugaring
The way sugar is used to preserve or process food is quite common when it comes to keeping fruit. Today sugar can be used in combination with alcohol to produce some branded alcoholic beverages and alcohol.
Salting
The salting process is used in food processing because it sucks moisture from food. This is done through the cleaning process. Meat is the ideal example of salted food because nitrates are very often used in beef.
Pickling
This type of food processing or storage involves boiling compounds and substances that destroy microorganisms. Pickling is quite common in vegetables such as peppers and cabbage. Canned meat and eggs are non-vegetarian foods that are put in brine. These are some fairly common ways of processing or storing food.
