抄録
Emulsions consist of two immiscible liquids, dispersed as small droplets of one in the other. In the field of food engineering, emulsions are widely used to incorporate food ingredients such as nutritional components, flavoring or coloring agents and antioxidants. The physicochemical environment in emulsion droplets is different from bulk phases, because of larger specific surface areas and compartmentalization effects. This results in particular phenomena in emulsion systems, for example decrease of lipid crystallization temperatures in small droplets. Recently, increased dispersion ability and physicochemical changes in the microenvironments of emulsion systems have been applied in development of novel food processing technologies. Given this background, a number of recent topics in research on food emulsions are presented in the special review “Developments in food emulsions contributing to the design of new functional influence”. One is recent progress in the preparation and characterization of micro-/nano-emulsions containing functional food components. A second focuses on retardation of lipid oxidation based on stochastic models, upon reducing emulsion droplet size. For the third topic, an overview of microchannel emulsification for preparing food-grade microdispersions, and improvement of their stability by layer-by-layer deposition is provided. Finally, the fourth topic concerns control of fat crystallization in emulsions.
