Field of Expertise
Dr. Hülya Çakmak graduated from Ege University (Türkiye) with the degrees of Food Engineering (BSc), and Food Technology (MSc and PhD). During her graduate and postgraduate education, she had worked about thermal processing of foods, food product and ingredient development, shelf-life assessment of foods, food properties like food micro structure, thermal and mechanical properties. She had focused on ingredient development for gluten-free product range. But she has also experience in plant-based proteins and plant-based ingredients particularly legumes, and mucilages from plant-based materials, waste recovery from agri-food materials especially upcycling of lignocellulosic materials. She had won EIT-Food Innovator fellowship scholarship in 2020 regarding her project entitled "Gluten-freeya" with her teammate from Spain, Germany and Italy.
She carried out postdoctoral studies which was funded by TÜBİTAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye) entitled "Formation of β-carotene-loaded lipid-based delivery systems with plant-based protein and polysaccharide complexes and their incorporation into complex food systems" in University of Lleida (Catalunia, Spain) under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Olga Martín-Belloso between 2023-2024. She had published several articles and book chapters. She is currently working in a public university as an Assoc. Prof. Dr. responsible from teaching and research activities.
Expertise
Moisture in foods are critical which is effecting their shelf-life, quality parameters like sensorial quality, texture, and preservation of nutritional composition without formation of any toxins or food spoilage microorganisms. Therefore, it is important to know and provide optimum processing conditions specific to that particular food. In this regard, if the naturally present water in the raw material would like to be preserved or maintained during processing, addition of dietary fibers from fruits and vegetables may help with their high water absorption capacity. But they also help to increase the total dietary fibres which helps to improve the health conditions related cardiovascular diseases, obesity, plasma lipid, cancer etc. and maintain or improve gut health. The dietary fiber addition comply with most of the countries' legislations, since they are already extracted from fruits and vegetables with minimal processing.
In addition to dietary fibres, food grades mucilages may help to bind the excess water, which promotes moistness perception in foods.
Moisture retention is very dependent on the food structure (solid/semi solid, texture, mechanical processing, particle size etc.), the processes applied to this food like heating/cooling, freezing, boiling, frying, baking. Besides, the packaging conditions and material and storage conditions of that food significantly affect the selection of appropriate material that will provide moisture retention. Thus, further discussion is essentially needed for compromising a product-specific solution.