Freezing food with liquid to perfectly preserve taste

J-STORIES - Does food lose some of its taste when frozen?

Many people think it does.

But a company in Kanagawa, just south of Tokyo, has developed its own technology for freezing food. By using liquid rather than gas, the method helps food keep its taste. Meanwhile, in order to promote the quality of its liquid freezing, the company is opening special shops that sell only frozen products.

While gas is usually used for freezing food, liquid freezing involves immersing packaged food in alcohol at minus 30℃. Using liquid, food can be frozen about 20 times faster than with gas. And the method produces almost no “drips” (loss of umami components during thawing) or uneven freezing, which can lead to flavor degradation

Technican, a company based in Yokohama, Kanagawa prefecture, developed such technology in the 1980s. Its CEO Yoshio Yamada, recalls on its YouTube channel how, when liquid frozen products were thawed, the results were so much better than the freezing technology of the time. He says, however, that “just getting people to understand that took 10 years.”

The company has named its freezing equipment that use this technology Tomin, which is Japanese for hibernation. The idea is that food comes back to life after thawing.

To promote the technology among the general public, the company opened its first boutique store specializing in frozen products in Yokohama on February 5, 2011. Then on February 11 this year, a second store opened in front of Tomizawa station in the city of Sendai. The shelves are filled with frozen sushi (for which freshness is key), fresh whitebait, and even sake. Products can also be bought online.

New and improved refrigeration technology is of great interest overseas as a way to reduce food loss. The company’s PR manager Hideki Tsudaya told J-Stories, “We will consider strategies such as setting up operations overseas when the time comes.”

 Translation and Editing by Tony McNicol 

 Top page photo by chernikovatv/Envato

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