Juices from unsellable tomatoes and Belgian endive residuals

A BioBoost report became available on the grinding and pressing tests on class II tomatoes and discarded Belgian endive heads and leaves. This report describes and explores different options to grind and press the tomatoes and the Belgian endive into a tasteful juice.

Healthy plant compounds

Fruits and vegetables are consumed raw, as minimally processed preparations or as fully processed foods and are characterized by their richness in various nutrients and bio-active compounds. Dealing with growing demand for fresh food and an elevated awareness in healthy alternatives and easy to consume food & drinks, the production of fruit and vegetable juices and smoothies gained attention. In addition, there’s increasing interest from the market to blend fruit and vegetable juices in more healthy, nutritional, tasteful recipes.

Grinding and pressing

BioBoost partners ILVO and Tomabel collaborated in testing different options to grind and press class II tomatoes and Belgian endive in order to use them for the production of healthy smoothies. Testing was done with a VaculIQ spiral filter press. This kind of press requires minimal space and efficiently juices diverse fruits and vegetables while under vacuum pressure. This method also protects valuable plant nutrients and vitamins, ensuring that fresh flavours and healthy ingredients are preserved from atmospheric oxygen. Different preceding grinding technologies can result in different inlet material for the juice press. Therefore Kreuzmayer milling was compared with colloid milling.

Results show promising perspectives

From the experiments carried out it is clear that sufficient milling and mixing technologies are available to produce fruit & vegetable purees which are suitable to be pressed with high yields using a spiral filter press VaculIQ press. Results have shown that the spiral-filter press leads to a conservation in vitamin C, phenolic compounds and carotenoids in the resulting juice and press residue fractions. A subsequent thermal treatment conserves the phenolic compounds and the AA content, but can result in a significant decrease in carotenoid content. That means that there are good perspectives for making healthy juices from fruit and vegetable residuals.

The full report can be found at the publications section.