Radio frequency reheating behavior in a heterogeneous food: A case study of pizza

摘要

Radio frequency (RF) energy could rapidly raise the material bulk temperature with deep power penetration and high energy efficiency. Although many studies on RF treatments have been carried out on different agricultural commodities or food, application of RF energy for studying heating behavior of heterogeneous food matrix is limited. Pizza is typically a heterogeneous food model with a base, cheese matrix and added toppings, and has been rarely evaluated for RF reheating. This study was aimed at using computer simulation for evaluating the RF reheating uniformity of a typical model pizza after baking based on measured thermal and dielectric properties (DPs) of its components (pizza base, cheese, salami and onion). The validation experiments were carried out up to a maximum reheating temperature of 85 degrees C in a 6 kW, 27.12 MHz RF system. The results showed that both dielectric constant and loss factor of pizza components increased with temperature, and at elevated temperatures, DP values for salami were the highest cheese, onion and pizza base. Both computer simulation and experiment provided similar temperature-time histories (with the maximum RMSE of 0.034 degrees C) in pizza base, cheese, salami and onion after RF reheating for 7.33 min. The fast RF reheating rate was observed in cooked salami both from the temperature-time history and predicted temperature distribution due to closed dielectric loss to constant value. The high sample temperature resulted in low moisture content. The RF heating uniformity could be improved by moving or rotating pizza and specially locating components in the further studies.