Monitoring the desalting process of cod using dielectric spectroscopy

The desalted cod industry needs a suitable and reliable control system to check the desalting point of cod in order to provide a safe and high-quality product. The growth of the industries that are interested in a non-contacting, real-time control, encourages the development of new methods based on low-power radiation, such as dielectric spectroscopy. These techniques use the modification of wave parameters at some specific frequencies to provide information of the compositional characteristics of foods. In this work, cod parallelepipeds were desalted at 5 degrees C by immersing them in distilled water for different desalting times (15 and 30 minutes and 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 24 and 48 hours). Dielectric Spectroscopy studies have been performed on cod samples in the frequency range 200 MHz-20 GHz. The dielectric properties were measured using a coaxial probe (Agilent 85070E) connected to a Network Analyzer (Agilent E8362B) immediately after removing the cod samples from their desalting solutions. After desalting, the cod samples were separated from their desalting solutions and kept in repose for 24 h at 5 degrees C after which some of their physical properties were measured. This experimental procedure ensures that those properties have already reached their final values. Good correlations were found between the quality properties of the cod samples (a(w), Xw, Z(NaCl) and xNaCl) after 24 h and their loss factor (epsilon") measured at 10 GHz just before leaving them in repose, showing the feasibility of an in-line control system for cod desalting process at that frequency.