11 - Gelatine, collagen, and single cell proteins as a natural and newly emerging food ingredients

Abstract

The growing demands for newly available commercial food production have pushed the manufacturers to produce food and dietary supplements with excellent nutritional properties by adding raw ingredients that contained nutritive values. Gelatin is a translucent, fragile, colorless, and flavorless raw ingredient which is derived from the partial hydrolysis of collagen, which is collected from the bones, skins, and hides of certain mammalian animals such as pigs and cows through the acid or alkali treatments along with high temperature, pressure extraction into water, sterilization, and drying. Gelatin is a rich source of (about 30%) animal protein and is widely used as a coating, binding, gelling, and glazing agent in food, pharmaceutical and cosmetics products including confectionaries, creams, lotions, face-masks, capsules shells, and dietary supplements because of its unique structural stability and excellent functional, nutritional, and other physiochemical properties. Single cell protein (SCP) is an edible unicellular microorganism which is extracted from the fermentation of agricultural waste products with the use of pure or mixed cultures of different microbial organisms such as fungi, yeast, algae, and bacteria. Nowadays, SCP is widely used as a raw ingredient or a protein substitute for the manufacture of various food products and animal feeds. This chapter will discuss the functional and nutritional properties of various newly emerging natural ingredient sources, whereas special priority will be given on their religious and cultural acceptability.