Effect of high pressure processing or freezing technologies as pretreatment in vacuum fried carrot snacks

Vegetable consumption remains lower than the recommended intake by health authorities. One possible strategy to increase the consumption of vegetable is the development of snacks. Most of vegetable snacks in the market are made through drying. However, dried products are far from the textural, appearance and mouthfeel properties of deep-fried products. The use of vacuum frying is an option for the development of appealing and yet healthy vegetable snacks. Nevertheless, pre-treatments are required to provide adequate final texture. To this regard, most studies are focused on osmotic pre-treatments. This study demonstrated that freezing and HPP pretreatments can be successfully applied in order to obtain crispy carrot chips. Furthermore, the use of pretreatments helped to maintain phenolic content and antioxidant capacity of the snacks.