Sheep milk ecology and benefits of ohmic heating processing

Many studies expose emerging technology advantages over conventional processes in food technology field as maintaining nutrients, more economic, eco-friendly and/or improving processing. Following it there is ohmic heating (OH) technology which this study evaluated the energy consumption, food safety and bioactive compounds in sheep milk and compare to conventional heating (CH) processing: high temperature short time pasteurization. Moreover, 16S rDNA high-throughput sequencing analysis was performed to assess sheep milk ecology. There was applied three OH different electric field strength (EFS: 3.33, 5.83 and 8.33 V cm-1) to pasteurize fresh and thawed sheep milk. As verified, OH proved to consume less energy than CH, being a faster process when applied higher EFS; and OH samples had bioactive compounds improved. Nevertheless, food safety verified by bacteria plate counts presented similar results as CH. Genomics data showed three principal abundant phyla containing a total of 24 genera identified with abundance more than 0,1 %. As well, it was demonstrated that OH could be advantageous over CH due to faster processing, more economic and eco-friendly energy source. However, experiment in large scale should be performed.