Water Barrier Edible Coatings of Fried Foods

Food deep frying induces several changes in both chemical and physical properties of the different components, including protein denaturation, starch gelatinization, water vaporization and crust formation [2,3], and foods normally absorb great amounts of oil during cooking. Thus, during the last ten years, there has been an increased interest in the scientific community to investigate new ways to reduce fat uptake by foods during frying. In fact, high oil content associated with many different diet products is indicated to be one of the most significant cause of high blood cholesterol level and pressure, and as a consequence of the increased incidence of both obesity and coronary heart diseases [4-6]. To this aim, health authorities as well as mass media advise of the desirability to decrease the proportion of fat in the average diet, and to develop food products containing low fat content. As oil uptake is the major nutritional critical point of deep frying, reaching in some cases even half of the total weight of the product [7,8], the main challenge in this field appears to realize a frying process improvement by controlling and lowering the final fat content of different foods subjected to such cooking procedure [9].