Microbial analysis of meatballs cooled with vacuum and conventional cooling.

Vacuum cooling is a rapid evaporative cooling technique and can be used for pre-cooling of leafy vegetables, mushroom, bakery, fishery, sauces, cooked food, meat and particulate foods. The aim of this study was to apply the vacuum cooling and the conventional cooling techniques for the cooling of the meatball and to show the vacuum pressure effect on the cooling time, the temperature decrease and microbial growth rate. The results of the vacuum cooling and the conventional cooling (cooling in the refrigerator) were compared with each other for different temperatures. The study shows that the conventional cooling was much slower than the vacuum cooling. Moreover, the microbial growth rate of the vacuum cooling was extremely low compared with the conventional cooling. Thus, the lowest microbial growth occurred at 0.7 kPa and the highest microbial growth was observed at 1.5 kPa for the vacuum cooling. The mass loss ratio for the conventional cooling and vacuum cooling was about 5 and 9% respectively.