論文ID: 24-21
Polysaccharides are widely used to preserve the texture of frozen desserts like ice cream by inhibiting ice recrystallization. Despite recent significant advances in research, a clear comprehension of the ice recrystallization inhibition mechanism of polysaccharides remains elusive. Some previous studies hypothesized that the ice recrystallization inhibition originates from the interaction between polysaccharides and ice crystal surface and tried to correlate it with the ice crystal shape. In this work, we have developed a novel method for analyzing the shape change of ice crystals during storage by curvature calculation. This method depicts the ice crystal shapes as the distribution of curvatures well expressing the changes of the ice crystal shapes. The newly developed method has been applied to evaluate the shape changes of ice crystals during the storage of sucrose solutions with and without kappa-carrageenan. The changes in curvature distributions revealed that ice crystals were rectangular with flat edges in the pure sucrose solution and were comparatively round in the sucrose/kappa-carrageenan solutions at longer storage time, which was not characterized in the roundness changes, showing the potentiality of using the curvature distribution to evaluate the shape change of ice crystals appropriately during storage.
