VACUUM FRYING – A FOOD PROCESSING METHOD
What is Vacuum Frying?
In Simple Terms, Frying that is carried out in vacuum or at lower atmospheric pressure is called vacuum frying.
Why Vacuum frying?
For getting right answer of that question, we have to go little deep into the why we are processing the food.
Lets take a look at that.
As a human, It is little bit difficult to consume all the food only in its original or raw form, all the day.
Of course the raw and fresh food has highest level of nutrition in it. so it is most healthy in terms of nutritional value.
But Any raw food has lot of other contamination like microbes or pathogens which is difficult to remove just by washing the fruits and vegetables.
So during the process of evolution we have developed a processing methods like roasting, Dehydrating, frying the food that we consume.
Now all these methods has some good things and some bad things.
Good things of food processing is:
The infectious things that is there in raw or fresh food like bacteria or pathogen, yeast that get destroyed during the processing.
After processing generally food becomes more tasty.
Due to processing, The shelf life of the food get increased compared to raw or fresh food, so food can get preserved for longer duration.
But Definitely as with any human developed technology there is some issues with that.
Not so good effects of food processing is:
The first thing is food’s nutritional value will degrade compared to fresh or raw food.
That is because food is exposed to varying degree of heat depending on which processing method have been used.
The some nutrients are very sensitive to heat so it get destroyed during the processing.
Now the question is frying is already the process that we do to our food then what is the need for vacuum frying.
Well, Frying has some limitation to itself
It is usually done around the temperature between 150-180 degree Celsius.
At that temperature only handfull of food can be processed, The very sensitive food like vegetable and fruits get burnt at that temperature.
So , as every problem has solution, mankind come up with the solution of frying the sensitive food at lower temperature.
And that is were the idea of frying the food product under vacuum initiated.
vacuum frying is performed under reduced pressure and at much lower temperature to preserve the foods nutrients as much Possible.
What are the products that can be Vacuum Fried?
Almost all the product that is deep fried can be vacuum fried.
Apart from that the List of Vacuum fried snacks are as follow :
