Freeze–thawing damage evaluation of vegetables with two cutting orientations

This work aimed to evaluate how cut orientation of squash, eggplant, and turnip affects the damage of tissues due to freeze/thawing process. For that, cylinders of 2 cm diameter and 0.5 cm height were cut in two orientations according to vascular tissues: longitudinal and transversal. Then, they were frozen at −20°C for 53 hr and thawed at 6.1°C for 12 hr. After that, two indirect methods to measure tissue damage were analyzed: by electrical conductivity of drip loss and by mass transfer during drying of samples before and after freeze/thawing process. As results, cut orientation showed significant effect on eggplant damage, finding approximately 143% more drip loss using transversal cut, than longitudinal cut. Regarding, turnip and squash, they did not show damage differences by freeze/thawing process using different cut orientations. In addition, measuring drip loss electrical conductivity demonstrated to be a more suitable method to assess freeze damage than mass transfer evaluation. This work concludes that cut orientation is an approach that cannot be ignored during freeze/thawing processes evaluation. Practical Applications: This work demonstrated that the orientation how vegetables are cut can affect the freeze–thawing process. This simple consideration should be considered to avoid obtaining low quality vegetables after thawed them. Despite this could not be observed during industrial process, consumers, who are not used to apply controlled conditions, can note food damages after product thawing.