Role of Lipids in Food Flavor Generation

Lipids in food are a source of essential fatty acids and also play a crucial role in flavor and off-flavor development. Lipids contribute to food flavor generation due to their degradation to volatile compounds during food processing, heating/cooking, and storage and/or interactions with other constituents developed from the Maillard reaction and Strecker degradation, among others. The degradation of lipids mainly occurs via autoxidation, photooxidation, and enzymatic oxidation, which produce a myriad of volatile compounds. The oxidation of unsaturated fatty acids generates hydroperoxides that then further break down to odor-active volatile secondary lipid oxidation products including aldehydes, alcohols, and ketones. In this contribution, a summary of the most relevant and recent findings on the production of volatile compounds from lipid degradation and Maillard reactions and their interaction has been compiled and discussed. In particular, the effects of processing such as cooking, drying, and fermentation as well as the storage of lipid-based foods on flavor generation are briefly discussed.