Improving the process of heat treatment of the stingray stellate

The results of developing a method for combined blanching (water – steam) of a stingray stellate have been presented. The proposed method completely excludes the process of preliminary wetting and, as a consequence the hydration of stingray meat; allows one to get a semi-finished product suitable for further processing for culinary purposes, as well as for canning. Analysis of the mass-size characteristics of wings of stingray stellate, caught in the Barents Sea, made it possible to identify a group of raw materials with a specific surface area 0.2560 ± 0.05 m2/kg, which corresponds to 75 % of the block weighing 10 kg with an average mass of the sample equal to 161.33 g. The presented experimental setup allows investigating the process of blanching with water, steam or a combined method of raw materials of both plant and animal origin. To plan the experiment, the combinatorial squares method has been applied. The effectiveness of urea removal from the stingray stellate meat has been confirmed experimentally by comparing the mass fraction of carbamide in muscle scate tissue before and after preliminary heat treatment accounting the characteristics of the product under study. The developed mode of combined blanching (water – steam) for stingray is characterized by an effective removal of urea (42.5 %) and can be used for industrial blanchers of processing lines. The mathematical model of the duration of steam treatment depending on the water temperature and the duration of water treatment, makes it possible to predict the regime of preliminary heat treatment of raw materials.