Food preservation

The modern food industry is hugely important to our society. These practicals focus on how food can be treated to prolong its storage time.

Experiments

• Standard technique Making serial dilutions
  Instructions for students, for making a series of dilutions of any substance.
• Standard technique Aseptic techniques
  Tools covered: wire loop, pipettes, cotton wool plugs.
  Procedures covered: inoculating plates, inoculating slopes, inoculating cultures, using a wire loop, using a pipette, flaming necks of bottles and test tubes, and disinfecting surfaces.
• Hazards of defrosted food
  Estimate the amount of microbial growth in defrosted foodstuffs.
  Make microbe cell counts using the Miles and Misra technique.
• Standard technique Making a pour plate
  A small amount of inoculum from a broth culture grows in a dish of medium. Determine a viable count per cm³ if the dilution produces 30-100 separate countable colonies.