When a food is PROCESSED, what kind of procedures...?!
For instance, like with
Juice?
Frozen Dinners?
Crackers?
Answers: does the 'process' include?
For instance, like with
Juice?
Frozen Dinners?
Crackers?
It's an important question you ask, but it is too complicated to answer here. People get graduate degrees trying to answer your question. Some processes are things we associate with normal cooking, such as mixing and baking; others are complex, and sound strange to people without specialized knowledge in large-scale food manufacture.
All sorts of things are done to raw materials to produce foodstuffs. Things are soaked in acids and lyes; they are subjected to heat, cold, water, steam, pressure, vacuums. Substances are added and others are removed. Foodstuffs are even subjected to ultraviolet light, sonic waves, and irradiation with gamma rays. How the food is packaged is also an issue in food processing.
Juices are processed with heat, microfiltration, and have water removed from them to create concentrates. Frozen dinners are too complex to give full treatment to, but the ingredients are subjected to cooking, freezing, and wrapping. Their ingredients are often modified with gums and starches to create a product that stands up to freezing well. They are also usually full of salt to replace flavors that are diminished by freezing.
Crackers are perhaps one of the less modified foodstuffs. They can be as simple as flour, water, salt and a leavening agent. Crackers may have other ingredients in them, but the only processing that goes into most crackers is mixing, rolling and baking.
American cheese/Velveeta is a food that is often thought of as processed. It is made by mixing cheese with oils, water, gums, and other substances, heating, molding and cooling, to make a uniform product that has a long shelf life, a familiar taste, and which melts well. The first time I saw soy cheese, I said, "So this is what you get when you take all the cheese out of Velveeta."
This is an enormous topic, so I suggest you set yourself free on the world wide web to find out how foods, including your favorites, are processed.
This is a good question and I can tell by the way you asked it your really want to know. First of all it depends on the food of course so I will answer you for the first two so it doesn't get so long.
Juice. It depends on how the juice is sold retail. (shelf stable, refrigerated, frozen concentrate) For example orange juice.
Shelf stable is squeezed, and then usually pulp all or some removed by screen, and then heated to a high temperature and bottled. That's why it sometimes tasted cooked. Refrigerated is the same only not heated as high. Just enough to pasteurize it. Of course it has a shorter shelf life but tastes better. Frozen concentrate is just that. Oranges are squeezed and concentrated in a falling film evaporator (or some other concentration device) Since all the pulp was removed some will be added back and for the name brands some volitile flavor notes will be added back. The packaged (usually in paperboard cylinder) and frozen.
Forzen dinners also depend on whats in them. But lets assume a chicken and mashed potatoes, vegetable. Chicken is brought to the assemble line already cooked either within the facility or from another plant. Mashed potatoes are made (usually) from dried potato flakes with add spices (garlic onion) for flavor. Forzen vegetables brought in from a vegetable plant. Put plastic or paperboard tray on line. place frozen chicken breast in tray. Deposit potatoes (usually with a volumetric filler). Add frozen vegetables (also with a volumetric filler). Put a lid on the tray and into the freezer. Sorry this is so long.
PhD Food Chemistry and Nutrition