Vacuum Cooling of Cooked Mussels (Perna perna)

Mussels pass through a thermal treatment during industrial processing with hot water or steam and then are pre-cooled before the manual extraction of the meat. This pre-cooling is classically accomplished by the immersion of the cooked mussels in cold water. In this work, vacuum cooling of mussels after the cooking stage was used as a technique to quickly decrease the product temperature and to avoid a possible microbial contamination by the cooling water or by manipulation. In about 3 minutes, mussels were cooled from about 90 °C to 20 °C. The relative weight loss during the vacuum cooling of the whole sample (meat and shell) was about 8% of the initial sample’s weight, for temperatures drop cited above. In this way, there was a 8.7 0.26 °C temperature drop for each 1% of weight loss. For separated meat (without shell), the ratio was 7.5 0.30 ºC per 1% weight loss, which agreed with the literature for vacuum cooling of meats in general. A simple numerical simulation was able to determine weight loss during the vacuum cooling process, providing data that agreed very well with experimental results. The vacuum cooling technique is a promising alternative for processing pre-cooked mussels, because process time is shortened and cross-contamination risk is significantly reduced in the cooling stage. The water loss is not a serious problem when the cooled mussels are canned in brine.