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Snacks represent a food that has gained great popularity due to changes in lifestyles in recent years and to the fact that many people now have less time to spend eating. There are different kinds of snack products which may be classified according to: (i) raw materials used in their production (vegetables, fruits, restructured dough, etc.) and (ii) unit operations used for their manufacture (frying, baking, extrusion, roasting, etc.). Potato crisps are the star product among the commercial snacks. This article briefly discusses the main quality characteristics of potato snacks, giving an overview of the most important aspects of their production and quality attributes. Current challenges in snack industry focus on producing healthier snacks (reducing the amount of fat, sodium and sugar, principally) without losing the typical quality characteristics of these products.

Heating foods immersed in oil during frying provides many attractive sensorial attributes including taste, flavor and color. However, some toxic compounds formed during frying of potatoes such as furan and acrylamide may constitute an increased cancer risk for consumers. The objective of this work was to mitigate the furan and acrylamide formation in potato chips without increasing their oil uptake by optimizing the blanching treatment before final frying. Potato slices were blanched in order to simultaneously leach out ascorbic acid and reducing sugars, the most important precursors of furan and acrylamide generation in thermally treated starchy foods. A central composite design was implemented to optimize the temperature-time blanching conditions under which furan, acrylamide and oil content in potato chips were minimized. The optimum blanching conditions were 64 °C and 17 min in which significant reductions of furan, acrylamide and oil content (91%, 54% and 19% respectively) were reached.

Acrylamide (AA) (CAS number 79-06-1) (CH2=CH–CO–NH2), a white, odorless, toxic crystalline compound is produced mainly for the synthesis of nontoxic polyacrylamide, which is used as a flocculent in water treatment, and as a binder in pulp and paper processing. AA affects the nervous system even at low levels, causing hallucinations and drowsiness (IARC 1994). Human health effects associated with consumption of small amounts of AA over long periods of time are not known (Bent et al. 2012). AA vapors irritate the eyes and skin and cause paralysis of the cerebrospinal system (Kotsiou et al. 2011). Chronic exposure results in neurotoxicity in animals and humans, and AA has been found to be carcinogenic to laboratory animals. As a result, AA has been classified as “probably carcinogenic to humans” (Group 2A) by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC 1994).

This research tested furan classification models in fried matrices based on the pattern recognition of images. Samples were fried at 150, 160, 170, 180, and 190°C for 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, and 30min. Furan was measured by GC-MS. Corresponding images were acquired and processed to extract 2175 chromatic and textural features. Principal component analysis was used to reduce features to 8-12 principal components. In parallel, sequential forward selection coupled with linear discriminant analysis (LDA) was the best strategy to select only 5-7 features. LDA was the best classifier with 91.39-97.60% recognizing above 113µg/kg and 69.54-83.80% to classify images from class 1 (0-38µg/kg) from class 2 (39-113µg/kg). Also, support vector machine recognized 87.71-96.74% of class 3 (114-398µg/kg) from class 4 (399-646µg/kg). The technique may be used to detect high amount of furan in fried starchy matrices.

Furan is a possible human carcinogen, which is formed in worldwide highly consumed fried starchy foods. In order to elucidate the mechanisms responsible for its occurrence in this food category and propose techniques for its mitigation, the kinetics of furan formation, oil absorption, lipid oxidation, and color change were studied in wheat flour-based model systems during frying at 160, 170, 180, and 190 °C up to 13 min and data were fitted to mathematical models. Additionally, an Arrhenius-type dependency with temperature was evaluated for all studied responses. More drastic frying conditions increased significantly (P ≤ 0.05) the furan content of fried samples. Furan formation followed a sigmoid trend with frying time only for frying temperature of 190 °C (RMS

Potato processing is highly industrialized, technologically advanced, and very market-driven. However, the quality of its products and the economic success of this industry highly depend on available raw materials: namely, the potatoes. Deep fat frying is a complex unit operation that induces significant microstructural changes in potato tissue; in fact, most desirable characteristics of fried foods are derived from the formation of a composite structure: (1) a dry, porous, crispy, and oily outer layer or crust; and (2) a moist cooked interior or core whose microstructures have formed during the process. On the other hand, when potatoes are cooked immersed in hot water (temperature ≤ 100 °C), no crust is formed and principally microstructural changes in potato tissue such as starch gelatinization and lamella media solubilization occur and end with a final microstructure similar to that present in the core of a french fry (moist cooked interior).