Purpose: Several preservation methods are viable in food industry for controlling the microbiological safety of liquid egg products (liquid whole egg (LWE), liquid egg yolk (LEY), and liquid egg white (LEW)); but, most of these use heat or preservatives. On the one hand, high temperatures are effective, but techno-functional properties could change. On the other hand, the use of preservatives is disliked by consumers.
Methods: In our study LEW, LWE and LEY were treated with HHP between 150 and 600 MPa (50 MPa, stepwise) for 5 minutes. Microbiological contamination of samples was examined to establish efficacy of HHP.
Results: Our results show that 450 MPa was enough to decrease microbiota of LWE by more than a four order of magnitude decrease. The same effect was obseved in LEW treated with 450 MPa HHP. But LEY, which was contaminated at a higher level, required, only, a 500 MPa HHP treatment to provide a five order of magnitude decrease in microbiota.
Significance: In our experiment, we found out that different pressure ranges of HHP are needed to decontaminate liquid egg products.