Food dehydration and product structure

Dehydration of biological material is a controlled effort to preserve the structure or create a new one that serves for functional purposes. In this context, food dehydration is revisited from the perspective of recent advances in food materials science, knowledge from desiccation in Nature, microstructural probing, novel processing technologies and deeper insights into drying mechanisms, among others. The role of structure in dehydrated products appears evident to understand transport mechanisms and to design functional properties. Some approaches and research topics in structure of dehydrated products are presented and discussed. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.