Headspace components that discriminate between thermal and high pressure high temperature treated green vegetables: identification and linkage to possible process-induced chemical changes

Abstract

For the first time in literature, this study compares the process-induced chemical reactions in three industrially relevant green vegetables: broccoli, green pepper and spinach treated with thermal and high pressure high temperature (HPHT) processing. Aiming for a fair comparison, the processing conditions were selected based on the principle of equivalence. A comprehensive integration of MS-based metabolic fingerprinting techniques, advanced data preprocessing and statistical data analysis has been implemented as untargeted/unbiased multiresponse screening tool to uncover changes in the volatile fraction. For all vegetables, thermal processing, compared to HPHT, seems to enhance Maillard and Strecker degradation reaction, triggering the formation of furanic compounds and Strecker aldehydes. In most cases, high pressure seems to accelerate (an)aerobic thermal degradation of unsaturated fatty acids leading to the formation of aliphatic aldehydes and ketones. In addition, both thermal and HPHT processing accelerated the formation of sulfur-containing compounds. This work demonstrated that the approach is effective in identifying and comparing different process-induced chemical changes, adding depth to our perspective in terms of studying a highly complex chemical changes occurring during food processing.

Keywords: Green vegetables; High pressure high temperature processing; MS-based chemical fingerprinting; Process induced chemical reaction; Sterilization; Thermal processing.