Flavor concentrates and their production

Details Flavor concentrates and their production Flavor concentrates and their production

1992-07-24

1994-07-19

Spear, Frank

Liquid purification or separation

Processes

Liquid/liquid solvent or colloidal extraction or diffusing...

2101952, B01D 6104

Patent

active

053306546

DESCRIPTION:

BRIEF SUMMARY
This invention relates to the production of flavour concentrates based on fruit or vegetable juices and to novel concentrates. It is of particular value for apple and pear juice concentrates.
It is standard practice to concentrate fruit and vegetable juices to produce concentrates that, upon dilution with water, resemble the original juice. The traditional way of concentration is by distillation. Unfortunately many of the volatile, but very desirable, flavours are taken off in the distillate. It is therefore known to fractionally distil this distillate so as to concentrate some at least of these flavours. The resultant concentrate is still dilute, since it contains more than 90% water and perhaps only around 1% flavour chemicals, and is known by various names. When it is derived from a fruit juice it is known in the trade as a "fruit ester". Usually this concentrate, or the early fractions of the initial distillate, are returned to the concentrated fruit or vegetable juice so as to enhance its flavour.
It might be thought that it would be possible to concentrate the "fruit ester" or other concentrated distillate to a higher concentration by distillation. However this is not practicable because of the boiling points and azeotroping potential of the various components in the weak concentrate. For instance the major component (apart from water) is generally ethanol and although some of the flavour chemicals are more volatile than ethanol many are less volatile, and so concentration by distillation will tend inevitably to give a product in which the amount of flavours, as a proportion of the ethanol content, is reduced. Also, the repeated fractional distillation that would be required to achieve any concentration of the weak concentrate would tend to result in the flavours undergoing chemical changes due to hydrolysis or degradation as a result of the repeated exposure to elevated temperatures.
Although distillation is the normal way of concentrating fruit juices and products derived from them, reverse osmosis has also been proposed. In U.S. Pat. No. 3,743,513 fruit juice is concentrated by distillation but the flavour of the concentrate is improved by blending into the concentrate a separately produced concentrate obtained by reverse osmosis of fruit juice.
In U.S. Pat. No. 4,322,448 a juice is subjected to reverse osmosis to give a concentrated retentate and a permeate that contains desirable flavours and which is then subjected to additional reverse osmosis whereupon the flavours are this time retained in the retentate, rather than in the permeate, and the two retentates are then blended.
In U.S. Pat. No. 4,401,678 a juice is subjected to reverse osmosis to give a retentate of reduced flavour and a permeate containing the flavours. The molecular weight cut-off of the membrane for this purpose is around 200 Dalton.
In EP 174594 a juice is subjected to ultra-filtration to give a retentate and an aqueous permeate containing flavour, and this permeate is then subjected to reverse osmosis to collect the flavours in the retentate, and the two retentates are then combined.
In EP 110638 citrus juice is stripped by steam to give a concentrate and a distillate which is then condensed, limonene oil is separated from the condensate, and the resultant aqueous phase is then concentrated by freezing or reverse osmosis. Juice or sugar is added to the concentrate before the reverse osmosis, and the resultant concentrated product is then blended with the original concentrate.
Thus all these methods are designed to increase the concentration of flavour in the fruit ester component and then to put it back into the original fruit juice concentrate. It has therefore been satisfactory for the concentration of the flavours that is put back into the fruit juice concentrate to be relatively low, for instance below 1% (as indicated above).
The described methods all perform reverse osmosis on a liquor which has a substantial saccharide content, generally sugar but optionally starch, and indeed many of the concentration methods are con

REFERENCES:
patent: 3552572 (1971-01-01), Lowe et al.
patent: 3556970 (1971-01-01), Wallace et al.
patent: 3617550 (1971-11-01), Elata et al.
patent: 3634103 (1972-01-01), Lowe et al.
patent: 3743513 (1973-07-01), Tulin
patent: 4401678 (1983-08-01), Beaumont
patent: 4491600 (1985-01-01), Gobel et al.
patent: 4952751 (1990-08-01), Blume et al.
Sheu, et al., "Preconcentration Of Apple Juice By Reverse Osmosis", Journal of Food Science, vol. 48 (1983) pp. 422-429.

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