Alginate Gels: II. Stability At Different Processing Conditions

Wet heating processes, such as boiling in water and steaming for different
periods (5, 10, 20, 30, 45 and 60 min), were employed to know the stability of
alginate gels along with obtaining the kinetics of textural parameters. A
compression test up to a strain of 0.8 was employed on unprocessed and
processed gels to know the different textural parameters (fracture force/
energy, compression energy, peak stress, firmness and linear elastic limit) that
characterized the mechanical behavior. These gels are heat stable and thermoirreversible
in nature, exhibiting a marginal decrease in volume after the
wet heat treatments. The order of kinetics of textural parameters is less than 1
and exhibits fractional values. Fracture force/energy, compression energy and
peak stress decreased with the time of treatment, whereas firmness and strain
at failure increased. A three-parameter nonlinear model has been proposed to
predict the force values during compression of food gels.