Egg yolk granules: Separation, characteristics and applications in food industry

•Egg yolk technology is currently a topic of great interest.•Egg yolk granules can be used as ingredient in food industry.•Applications have been developed at pilot scale.•The number of these studies has appreciably increased recently.

Egg yolk is a multifunctional ingredient in many food applications, as it binds interesting functional attributes (foaming, coagulative, emulsifiying, colouring, etc. properties). Last years, numerous extensive studies characterizing egg components have been carried out. This has led to the development of new promising technologies to expand the egg-processing industry into new applications. Individual constituents of yolk are difficult to separate; thus, nowadays, only plasma and granules can be easily fractionated from yolk at an industrial scale. Recently, different works have reported the interesting composition and properties of granules to be used as ingredient in food industry, some of these works have even developed applications at pilot scale. Afterwards, this review provides an update on the different methods employed to obtain egg yolk granules, with a description of their constituents and functionalities and finally the future possibilities to employ them as ingredient in food industry.