Mooncake production waste: Nutritional value and comprehensive utilization of salted duck egg white

Using salted egg white in steamed bread: Impact on functional and structural characteristics

Steamed bread has long been an important part of Chinese cuisine. This study investigated the effects of salted egg white (SEW) (5, 10, 15, and 20% w/w) on the quality of steamed breads. Findings revealed that SEW notably enhanced the bread's volume and texture, with a 20% inclusion significantly boosting water retention and rheological properties, albeit reducing bread's lightness. In addition, the H-bond absorption band intensity in the Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) analysis showed increased peak intensities with higher SEW levels, indicative of protein structure alterations. X-ray diffraction confirmed the presence of an amylose-lipid complex. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) and Confocal laser scanning microscope (CLSM) imaging depicted a smooth, consistent protein network with SEW addition. Consumer sensory evaluation responded favourably to the SEW15 steamed bread, suggesting its potential for food industry application. Overall, the study considers SEW an effective ingredient for improving steamed bread quality.

On-Line Detection Method of Salted Egg Yolks with Impurities Based on Improved YOLOv7 Combined with DeepSORT

Salted duck egg yolk, a key ingredient in various specialty foods in China, frequently contains broken eggshell fragments embedded in the yolk due to high-speed shell-breaking processes, which pose significant food safety risks. This paper presents an online detection method, YOLOv7-SEY-DeepSORT (salted egg yolk, SEY), designed to integrate an enhanced YOLOv7 with DeepSORT for real-time and accurate identification of salted egg yolks with impurities on production lines. The proposed method utilizes YOLOv7 as the core network, incorporating multiple Coordinate Attention (CA) modules in its Neck section to enhance the extraction of subtle eggshell impurities. To address the impact of imbalanced sample proportions on detection accuracy, the Focal-EIoU loss function is employed, adaptively adjusting bounding box loss values to ensure precise localization of yolks with impurities in images. The backbone network is replaced with the lightweight MobileOne neural network to reduce model parameters and improve real-time detection performance. DeepSORT is used for matching and tracking yolk targets across frames, accommodating rotational variations. Experimental results demonstrate that YOLOv7-SEY-DeepSORT achieves a mean average precision (mAP) of 0.931, reflecting a 0.53% improvement over the original YOLOv7. The method also shows enhanced tracking performance, with Multiple Object Tracking Accuracy (MOTA) and Multiple Object Tracking Precision (MOTP) scores of 87.9% and 73.8%, respectively, representing increases of 17.0% and 9.8% over SORT and 2.9% and 4.7% over Tracktor. Overall, the proposed method balances high detection accuracy with real-time performance, surpassing other mainstream object detection methods in comprehensive performance. Thus, it provides a robust solution for the rapid and accurate detection of defective salted egg yolks and offers a technical foundation and reference for future research on the automated and safe processing of egg products.

The Quality Characteristics Formation and Control of Salted Eggs: A Review

Salted egg, a traditional characteristic processed egg product in China, is popular among consumers at home and abroad. Salted egg quality characteristics formation primarily includes the hydration of egg white, the solidification of egg yolk, the unique color and flavor of salted egg yolk, and the formation of white, fine, and tender egg whites and loose, sandy, and oily egg yolks after pickling and heating. The unique quality characteristics of salted eggs are mostly caused by the infiltration dehydration of salt, the intermolecular interaction of proteins, and the oxidation of lipids. In recent years, to solve the problems of salted eggs having high salinity, long production cycle, and short storage period, the pickling technology for salted egg has been improved and researched, which has played a significant role in promoting the scientific production of salted eggs. This paper summarizes the mechanisms of salted egg quality characteristics formation and factors influencing quality, with a perspective of providing a theoretical basis for the production of high-quality salted eggs.