Model discrimination for drying and rehydration kinetics of freeze‐dried tomatoes

The aim of this work is to investigate the effect of a highly interconnected porous microstructure on the quality of rehydrated tomatoes by (a) designing a freeze‐dried cycle that ensure product integrity (i.e., no collapse, no puffing) (b) characterizing both freeze‐drying and rehydration kinetics. Fresh tomatoes were first freeze‐dried and subsequently rehydrated to get generate kinetics data. Afterwards, six thin‐layer drying models and four rehydration models were fitted using regression analysis to the experimental data. The goodness‐of‐fit was evaluated according to root mean squared error, adjusted R2, Akaike information criterion, and Bayesian information criterion. The most accurate representations of the system kinetics were observed using the Page model for freeze‐drying and the exponential and Weibull models for rehydration. Rehydration capacities and equilibrium moisture contents of the rehydrated samples were found to increase with temperature, and the corresponding activation energy values were calculated.