Effects of pulsed electric field treatments on quality of peanut oil

The effects of pulsed electric fields (PEF) treatment on physicochemical properties of peanut oil were investigated in this paper. Compositions of fatty acid, acid value (AV), peroxide value (PV), as well as carbonyl group value (CGV) of various PEF-treated peanut oil samples with different storage time were determined by GC/MS and AOCS standard methods. GC/MS analysis showed that little change of the oil composition was observed after PEF treatment. However, after being treated by various PEF treatments and stored at 40 °C for 100 days, the biggest increment of AV was 0.69 mg g−1, which was lower than that of untreated peanut oil (0.79 mg g−1). The PV significantly increased from 4.8 meq kg−1 untreated oil to 11.5 meq kg−1 PEF treated oil (50 kV cm−1). And the increase extent of CGV of oil samples during the 100 d’ storage period was decreased with increasing electric field strength. During the storage period, the differences of AV, PV, and CGV of PEF-treated sample during storage period were less than that of untreated oil, which implied that the PEF treatment could restrain the speed of lipid oxidation reaction thus extending the shelf-life of oil rich products.