The effect of heat and certain environmental factors on thiamine stability has been the subject of several comprehensive investigations (2, 3, 8,9,10,12,13, 14,16,17, 18,19). There is good evidence that in pure thiamine solutions the destruction by heat is primarily a hydrolytic cleavage to give pyrimidine and thiazole derivatives (20), and that the reaction rate may be expressed by the conventional equation for a first-order reaction. The effect of p H on the rate of thiamine destruction in pure solutions has been explored (8, 16), with the result that it is well known that thiamine is less stable in alkaline than in acid solutions. Although the stability of thiamine in the presence of extraneous materials, such as foodstuffs, and the more common anions also has been investigated (6, 17), conclusions from this work often have been masked by factors which are only vaguely understood.An expanded knowledge of the factors which influence the stability of thiamine during the sterilization of canned foods is needed by those individuals engaged in developing new food processing methods which might improve the retention of this important vitamin. This is especially true if such information could lead to generalizations in regard to destruction rates at elevated temperatures. Recent descriptions (5, 11, 15) of new processing methods make reference to the markedly improved thiamine retentions which may be realized commercially through the use of high-temperature, short-time processing methods. Some workers ( 5 ) have pointed out that the amount of thiamine destruction during sterilization has been often used as an index to other chemical changes which take place during processing.
EXPERIMENTALFour vegetables which are normally processed in large quantities were selected for systematic investigation with regard t o the effect of time, temperature, and other variables which might affect thiamine stability. F o r this purpose, tomato juice was chosen as a typically acid product which requires a relatively mild heat treatment in order to render it sterile. Peas and corn were selected as products which require a relatively intense heat treatment for sterilization, and which represent a high and a low thiamine product, respectively. Lima beans were included because significantly different degrees of retention of thiamine had been previously noted upon processing mature and immature Lima beans in the same retort (71 and 5070, respectively) (4).As a general approach, it was decided that each of these products should be processed over a rather wide temperature range, and that the thiamine content should be determined a t relatively short intervals of time during the course of processing. In order to assure a uniform temperature over substantially all of the time interval of the experiment, all processing was done in small containers (211 x 214 or 208 x OOS), and *Presented a t the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the IFT, New York, N. Y.