Okara, a soybean by-product of tofu production, was treated with microwave irradiation in water for solubilization of its components. The solubilization rate increased with increasing temperature and reached higher than 70% around 200℃ with a heating time of 7 min. The main solubilized components were neutral carbohydrates consisting of arabinose and galactose, while the residues were mainly composed of cellulose. LV-SEM images confirmed solubilization of cell wall components. Production of new polyphenolic compounds that have antioxidant activity was observed above 180℃. The heating temperature and heating time were optimized for neutral carbohydrate solubilization using the response surface methodology. The optimized condition was heating at 196℃ for 2 min, indicating that a short heating time is effective for solubilization of carbohydrates to prevent secondary decomposition.Keywords: soybean residue, Okara, microwave heating, response surface methodology *To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: stsubaki@kais.kyoto-u.ac.jp
IntroductionOkara (soybean residue) produced following extraction of soymilk from soybean is mainly constituted with dietary fibers accompanied by other substances such as protein and lipids (O'Tool, 1999). As it amounts to 7.0 x 10 5 tons per year in Japan (O'Tool, 1999) and is mostly burnt or dumped into landfills, establishing a utilization process is necessary to prevent possible global warming and environmental pollution. Extraction of its components is one utilization scheme for recycling purposes. Several studies have reported on the extraction of these components, including pectic polysaccharide (Yamaguchi et al., 1996), oil components using supercritical carbon dioxide (Quitain et al., 2006), oligosaccharides by enzymatic digestion (Kasai et al., 2004) and mainly carbohydrates by subcritical-water treatment (Harada et al., 2004). Several treatments have been previously developed for the extraction of components from biomass, such as physical (mechanical comminution and pyrolysis), physico-chemical (steam explosion, ammonia fiber explosion and CO 2 explosion), chemical (ozonolysis, acid hydrolysis, alkaline hydrolysis, oxidative delignification, solvolysis process) and biological treatments (wood rotting fungi) (Sun and Cheng, 2002;Mosier et al., 2005). Subcritical-water is one of the tools for hydrolysis of biomass (Yu et al., 2008;Akiya and Savage, 2002), as it has a lower dielectric constant and higher ion product than water under ambient conditions, leading to hydrolysis of polymers in biomass without a catalyst.Microwave heating is now attracted much attention as an alternative heating source (Adam, 2003) for its environment friendliness, known as green chemistry. Microwaves enable rapid and uniform heating of polar substances by direct and internal heating generated by friction of dipole rotations. Microwave heating has been widely applied in organic chemistry (Perreux and Loupy, 2001;Lidström et al., 2001), extraction methods (microwave-assisted extraction; MAE) ...