Oat: Current state and challenges in plant-based food applications

Oat has long been recognized as a good candidate for both human foods and animal feeds. However, the significance of oat, as well as its contribution to the food industry and human health, has been realized only in recent years. Due to the unique property and functionality of oat's components (e.g., proteins, starches, and β-glucans), it has been widely used in many foods, such as bread, noodles, flakes, and milk. The nutritional quality, textural property, and formation of lipid-derived off-flavors are the main challenges that disturbed current application of oat in foods. The improving strategies, including thermal and non-thermal treatments as well as bioprocessing methods for producing stable and high quality oat products, are introduced and compared. The overwhelming recent advances presented in this review highlighted the current state and challenges for application of oat as promising ingredient in future-food development. Processing methods, including thermal treatments, non-thermal treatments, and biotechnologies are commonly used in oat processing. Traditional thermal treatments are efficient approaches to improve the storage quality of oat products, but sometimes may be unbeneficial to their nutritional quality. Recently, the non-thermal techniques and biotechnologies have gained more attentions for oat processing due to their mild and eco-friendly properties, which can maintain the storage stability, improve the textural property and nutritional quality of oat foods. In future, new innovative technologies should be developed for oat food production to satisfy the critical requirements of the food industry and consumers.