Mass spectrometry
is a popular and powerful analytical tool to
study the effects of food processing. Industrial sampling, real-life
sampling, or challenging academic research on process-related volatile
and aerosol research often demand flexible, time-sensitive data acquisition
by state-of-the-art mass analyzers. Here, we show a laboratory-scaled,
miniaturized, and highly controllable setup for the online monitoring
of aerosols and volatiles from thermal food processing based on dielectric
barrier discharge ionization (DBDI) mass spectrometry (MS). We demonstrate
the opportunities offered by the setup from a foodomics perspective
to study emissions from the thermal processing of wheat bread rolls
at 210 °C by Fourier transformation ion cyclotron resonance MS.
As DBDI is an emerging technology, we compared its ionization selectivity
to established atmospheric pressure ionization tools: we found DBDI
preferably ionizes saturated, nitrogenous compounds. We likewise identified
a sustainable overlap in the selectivity of detected analytes with
APCI and electrospray ionization (ESI). Further, we dynamically recorded
chemical fingerprints throughout the thermal process. Unsupervised
classification of temporal response patterns was used to describe
the dynamic nature of the reaction system. Compared to established
tools for real-time MS, our setup permits one to monitor chemical
changes during thermal food processing at ultrahigh resolution, establishing
an advanced perspective for real-time mass spectrometric analysis
of food processing.