Effect of ultra-high pressure treatment on tissue structure and quality of sea cucumber

In order to develop instant sea cucumber with long shelf life, ultra-high pressure technology was adopted to processing sea cucumber in this paper,to study the change tissue structure and quality of sea cucumber treated by 100 ~600 MPa ultra-high pressure for 5 min. The results showed that the ultra-high pressure treatment could destroy the structure of the sea cucumber muscle,and the phenomenon of depression or shrunken porosity appeared. With the increase of the pressure,the texture of the sea cucumber showed the trend of first rising and then decreased. While the pressure increasing,the water holding rate continued to increase,reached to the maximum of 87.97% at 500 MPa,which increased nearly 45% compared with un-processing sea cucumber. The color of that become lighter under ultra-high pressure,showed the brightness and yellow were increased while decreasing the red. During storage,the shelf life of sea cucumber was increased due to the decreased residual quantity of microorganism with ultra-high pressure increasing,and sea cucumber treated by 500 MPa could keep commercial sterile 5 weeks when storied in 37 ℃,the change of protein,soluble oligopeptide(TCA) and p H content of sea cucumber during storage were more small under higher pressure. Therefore,the quality of sea cucumber treated by ultra-high pressure would improve though the change of microstructure,which is conducive to the development and research of instant sea cucumber.