PhD student Technion Israel Institute of Technology Haifa, Israel
Abstract: The food industry is actively seeking new food formulations that can replace and/or mimic saturated and trans fats in various systems such as bakery, cheese, meat, and other plant-based products, due to their clear deleterious health issues. These attempts have led to increased interest in food architecture design and development aiming to replace the harmful lipid ingredients while maintaining desirable textural and mouthfeel experience. Such attempts are illustrated by the increase variety of soft matter systems proposed in the literature such as oleogels, emulsion gels, emulsion and bigels, all of which involve the use of high amount of unsaturated tri-acylglycerides (TAGs) at various combinations. It is well established that unsaturated TAGs are prone to oxidation in the presence of energy, in the shape of temperature and/or light.
The current research aims to understand the effect of various structuring methods on the oil oxidation on the molecular level and relate that to the overall system performance. The oxidation of oil was monitored over time by applying light and temperature treatments and at different temperatures at fixed time period. A clear effect of energy source, i.e. temperature and light, as well as time was observed. The effect of structuring agent at different concentrations was also examined showing the role of the structuring agent type on the oxidation cascade progress. More complex system in the form of bigel was examined to explore the effect of water on the oxidation process. It seems that oxygen dissolution in the various phases has a major role in the oxidation process in biphasic systems.
