Current problems of raw fish material processing while manufacturing dried products

The substantiation for using techniques of fish raw material canning has been presented, raw fish being caught or farmed in aquaculture. The main problems in raw fish canning have been reviewed, including significant reduction in thermolabile vitamins in the ultimate product as compared with the raw material due to the thermal processing. Promising canning technique – vacuum drying – has been proposed. This technique makes possible to reduce the temperature of thermal processing down to 50…55 °С and significantly enlarge preservation of thermolabile vitamins from the raw fish. Sampling of raw materials, semi-finished products, finished products, including preparation for analysis has been conducted by standard methods. Disadvantages of this way have been found, it is low energy efficiency of the process. The way to intensify the vacuum drying of aquatic organisms has been proposed based on the method of preliminary pore-forming due to augmenting the area of moisture evaporation. The design of the pilot plant has been proposed in order to research the process of pore forming and vacuum drying. Target species for processing have been suggested. They are as follows: Azov goby (fillet) for food products and Black Sea sprat for feeds. The recipes of the feed mixture for granulated floating food for trout have been developed. The results of the first series of the pilot research have been provided. The experiments have proved that preliminary pore forming immediately before vacuum drying makes possible to enlarge the surface area of moisture evaporation by 15…25 %. By processing photomicrographs of sections by means of a special software the authors have got the results demonstrating that when manufacturing dried products by pore forming and drying under pressure 10 kPa the pore take 35...38 % of the inner volume of the product and with drying under pressure 10 kPa – only 18...21 %, and when drying under the atmospheric pressure – 11...13 %.