Additives, Added in Food during Processing (Part 5)

Additives

Additives are chemical compounds that are added in Food during processing for many purposes like to enhance taste, color or for the purpose of preservation like colors, flavors, stabilizers.

I described about how the additives are used to Improve Nutrition of the Food. Here is the next non-preservative effect of additives that is:
Improvement of Functional Properties of Food
Fresh or processed food have a specific texture that is like firmness of food, as time passes food starts to shrink due to water loss. That is not a good quality sign. We need homogenized textures in food which may contain oil and water both. These are insoluble but the product should be homogenized so we have to add some chemicals or components that will make them homogenized. This can be done by using Emulsifier. As emulsifiers are the chemical compounds that will bound the polar and non-polar at same time. Because emulsifiers have one end with hydrophillic character and one end with hydrophobic character.

Credits: Bioninja

Hydrophillic are those which loves to bound polar end or water end.
While hydrophobic are those that have phobia to water or will not make bound to water.

So emulsifier will make bounding to both water and fat, producing homogenized product of fat and oil known as emulsion.