Evaluation of the effect of supercooling applied before ice nucleation during food freezing.

In order to prevent the damages on microstructures in frozen food materials, rapid freezing has been the only way to avoid the growth of ice crystals up to now. Recently, a novel freezing method that utilizes supercooling phenomena has becoming focused for its potential to be an ultimate freezing method. But there has been no research works that investigated the effect of supercooling on food freezing from the scientific point of view. In this article, the authors made an experimental study on how the supercooling before ice nucleation affects the characteristics of ice crystals formed in food materials. From the results of experiments by using tofu as test sample, it was found the size of ice crystals was smaller and the number of ice crystals was greater in the sample frozen via supercooling than conventionally frozen samples. Further, drip amount was clearly reduced by applying supercooling before ice nucleation.