Abstract
The low consumer acceptance to entomophagy in Western society remains the strongest barrier of this practice, despite these numerous advantages. More positively, it was demonstrated that the attractiveness of edible insects can be enhanced by the use of insect ingredients. Currently, insect ingredients are mainly used as filler agents due to their poor functional properties. Nevertheless, new research on insect ingredient functionalities is emerging to overcome these issues. Recently, high hydrostatic pressure processing has been used to improve the functional properties of proteins. The study described here evaluates the functional properties of two commercial insect meals (Gryllodes sigillatus and Tenebrio molitor) and their respective hydrolysates generated by Alcalase®, conventionally and after pressurization pretreatment of the insect meals. Regardless of the insect species and treatments, water binding capacity, foaming and gelation properties did not improve after enzymatic hydrolysis. The low emulsion properties after enzymatic hydrolysis were due to rapid instability of emulsion. The pretreatment of mealworm meal with pressurization probably induced protein denaturation and aggregation phenomena which lowered the degree of hydrolysis. As expected, enzymatic digestion (with and without pressurization) increased the solubility, reaching values close to 100%. The pretreatment of mealworm meal with pressure further improved its solubility compared to control hydrolysate, while pressurization pretreatment decreased the solubility of cricket meal. These results may be related to the impact of pressurization on protein structure and therefore to the generation of different peptide compositions and profiles. The oil binding capacity also improved after enzymatic hydrolysis, but further for pressure-treated mealworm hydrolysate. Despite the moderate effect of pretreatment by high hydrostatic pressures, insect protein hydrolysates demonstrated interesting functional properties which could potentially facilitate their use in the food industry.
Highlights
The interest in entomophagy, defined as the practice of eating insects, is growing due to its environmental and nutritional benefits compared to other livestock [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
The chitin content was similar in both insect meals (4.2 to 4.8%) but was significantly lower in hydrolysates (0.02 to 0.07%) because this water-insoluble polysaccharide [40] was removed by the centrifugation step performed to recover the soluble protein fraction
This study demonstrated that some functional properties of commercial insect meals, mainly solubility and the oil binding capacity (OBC), can be enhanced by enzymatic hydrolysis by Alcalase®
Summary
The interest in entomophagy, defined as the practice of eating insects, is growing due to its environmental and nutritional benefits compared to other livestock [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. Oven-drying is the most widely used method for production of edible insect meal at a commercial scale [17,18]. Kröncke et al studied the effect of different drying methods on the solubility of mealworm (Tenebrio molitor) proteins [19]. The solubility of mealworm (T. molitor) proteins decreased significantly, from 53% in the fresh state to only 14% after oven-drying [19]. This decrease in solubility was caused mainly by protein denaturation during heat treatment, which unfolds and exposes previously hidden hydrophobic groups [21]
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