Aspectos teóricos del proceso de liofilización de alimentos

Abstract

Due to the emergency related to the food supply in Venezuela nowadays, it is necessary developing, in a short time, some systems and processes pointing to conservation of season food to enable them to be consumed during the whole year. One of the most used methods is the dehydration, which consists in removing only the water content from the food. In this paper, some theoretical aspects of a dehydration technique known as lyophilization, to process food by vacuum removing the water at moderate temperature. In this process, evaporation of water from its liquid phase, as ordinarily happens during drying, does not occur but by sublimation of ice to evaporate to steam water without passing for the liquid phase. That is why the material should be frozen at the beginning of the drying process.