KIT RELIABILITY FOR CONTROLLING THE QUALITY OF OILS IN FOOD FRYING

Abstract

In Benin, West Africa, frying is one of the major ways of cooking. However, the chemical composition of the oil used in the food frying process contains unsaturated fatty acids and other by-products that compromise the oil quality making it toxic and often carcinogenic. The aim of this study was to check the reliability of kits in controlling three frying yams oil quality. The food frying was performed using oil in a discontinuous heating period of 15 min followed by three hours of cooling period for two experimental days. The temperature, and the oil chemical samplings were assessed with the kit every thirty minutes. In addition, selected oil chemical characteristics were determined to quantitatively and qualitatively appreciate the chemical modifications during the fast food versus the rapid food processing methods. Our findings indicate that water and volatile chemical compounds vary significantly for the first day of analysis from 0.18% to 1.6% for groundnut oil; from 0.14% to 1.4% for palm oil and from 0.17% to 1.6% for cotton oils. We detected a decrease of iodine index to 25%; 35.31% and 27.78% for groundnut, palm and cotton oils respectively. However, the peroxide index increases to 55.33%; 61.90% and 57.78% for groundnut, palm and cotton oils respectively. The increases of acid and saponification indices were also observed. Under conjugated effect of water temperature contained in the yam and air contact, the chemical characteristics of oil vary with the frying time. Our results reveal concordance consistent data with both the rapid methods and laboratory data set analysis.