Influence of Food Composition on Freezing Time

Freezing is still the best way to preserve food when is carried out properly and allows production of food without any chemical preservatives. It is important to accurately predict the freezing time of different kinds of food to assess the quality and safety of the foodstuffs, processing requirements, and economical aspects of food freezing. The aim of this research was to investigate the influence of food product composition on freezing time. The research based on hypothesis: the composition of food product has significant effect on freezing time considering that the products have the same shape, mass and relief. In our research we recorded four batches of standard product with three different fillings (chocolate, vanilla and forest fruit) at the same freezing conditions. The products from puff pastry were always made from the same ingredients and also mass, shape, relief, slab and surface were constant. The core temperature after 41 minutes of freezing at air temperature ? 32 oC ± 2 oC and constant velocity reached in chocolate product ? 24.4 oC ± 0.2 oC, meanwhile in forest fruit ? 17.0 oC ± 0.2 oC and vanilla only ? 12.8 oC ± 0.2 oC; thus confirmed our hypothesis. For SMEs (small and medium size food enterprisers) which represent 99 % of all enterprises in the EU, it is essential to establish their own model for predicting freezing time which is more applicable that generaltheoretical models that require a lot of data which are not common accessible for SMEs.