Abstract
Plant-based foods should be fresh, safe, and natural, with nutritional value and processed in sustainable ways. Among all consumed vegetables, Brassica vegetables are considered to be the most important ones. As they are eaten in large quantities and frequently, they may constitute an important source of nutrients and bioactive compounds in a daily diet. This work is aimed at assessing the effect of technological processing (blanching and traditional cooking in water and in a convection steam oven) as well as the method of frozen storage (in PE-LD zipper bags and vacuum packing) on the content of selected components in purple cauliflower. The material was examined for the content of dry matter, vitamin C, total polyphenols, anthocyanins, thiocyanates, nitrates, and nitrites, as well as antioxidant activity. All technological processes caused significant changes in the contents of examined nutritive and non-nutritive compounds as well as in antioxidant activity or the level of selected chemical pollutions. A trend was also observed towards lower constituents’ losses as a result of convection steaming, compared to traditional cooking in water. Moreover, the reduction in the content of examined compounds was smaller in vacuum-packed and frozen-stored vegetables then in those stored in zipper PE-LD bags.
Highlights
Sustainable food consumption is a significant aspect of sustainable development
Dry matter content in the vegetable varies depending on the process applied, to show only an effect of the applied process, all the results presented below have been calculated per the dry matter unit
Frozen storage of the analyzed material for 2 and 4 months led to a substantial (p ≤ 0.05) increase in the dry matter content respectively by 31.1 and 32.2% and 30 and 32.2% compared to the blanched product (Table 2)
Summary
Sustainable food consumption is a significant aspect of sustainable development. Throughout the last two decades, Brassica crops were of intense interest to many researchers due to their health benefits [1]. Botrytis) belongs to the very popular Brassica species and is broadly used as a dish or an ingredient of soups or salads. Cauliflower genotypes show differences in the content of bioactive compounds, as well as in the chemical composition [4,5,6] This vegetable contains a lot of valuable and healthy plant’s metabolites, including flavonoids, terpenes, S-methylcysteine sulfoxide, sulfur-containing glucosinolates, coumarins, and other minor compounds. These compounds of cauliflower, and other Brassica vegetables, were found to be effective in the protection of some kinds of cancer as cancer-fighting components [4,7,8]. Some of Brassica crops are classified as functional foods [7]
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