Healthier diets, food safety and convenience are main targets for current consumers aiming at high nutritional and sensory quality plant products. Recently, innovative and attractive ready-to-use and ready-to-eat vegetarian diets are concerned. In this context, Brassicaceae is a vegetable family that is highly appreciated due to their bioactive compounds, but it is consumed mostly after processing. However, food processing can result in various changes in the content of health-promoting compounds such as glucosinolates (GLSs), the main compounds in Brassica vegetables. Novel broccoli-based vegetarian diets (BVD) had been formulated according to a new recipe as ready-to-use diet. Subsequently, the effect of cooking methods on the phytochemicals such as carotenoids, flavonoids and flavonols as well as GLSs contents have been investigated.
Primarily results indicated that the phytochemicals were sufficient and valuable. The effect of cooking methods was varied, whereas the effect of steaming, microwaving and backing were lower than stir-frying and stir-frying/microwaving which considerably reduce the phytochemicals content. Interestingly, the possibility of producing BVD as ready-to-use and ready-to-eat could provide a promising approach for improving the traditional meals and potential benefits for human health. Indeed, studying the changes of GLSs and further phytochemicals during processing is shown to be valuable to understand the impact of processing and to optimize processing conditions for health benefits of these compounds.
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