**9. Food texture**

Maceration is a process by which an organised tissue is transformed into a suspension of intact cells, resulting in pulpy products (soft texture), which are used as a base material for pulpy juices nectar, baby foods, and ingredients for dairy products, such as puddings and yogurts [39]. Enzymatic degradation of pectin after a mild mechanical treatment often improves the properties of the final product. An appropriate treatment with pectinase will transform the mechanically disrupted tissue into a suspension of intact cells. In this regard, PG is the best pectolytic enzyme to be used for this purpose [10].

The phenomenon of hard-to-cook (HTC) legumes was found to be dependent upon the presence of water-insoluble pectic substances in the middle lamella that keep the firmenss of the legume tissues. HTC dry broad beans (*Vicia faba* L.) possess a hard middle lamella, and some early studies [58] showed that when they were soaked in a citrate buffer pH 4.5 containing 0.1% of a commercial pectolytic preparation (Rohament P) at 45°C for 12 hours before cooking, the enzyme did not affect the grain wetting coefficient. Moreover, large amounts of galacturonic acid and reducing sugars were leached out into the soaking medium. As a result, the cooking period was reduced and texture of cooked beans (assessed as Kramer's shear force) was severely soften by the presence of the enzyme preparation in the soaking water. Accordingly, it was speculated that the activity of the pectolytic preparation was acting upon insoluble protopectin, leaching out galacturonic acid and sugars in the soaking water, and leading to a loss of tissue cohesion [7, 58]. In this regard, results from later experiments on HTC broad beans soaked in an aqueous solution of a crude extract of pectinase activity produced by *A. sojae* (ATCC 20235) showed that the soaking time was reduced by half and the cooking time of beans was reduced to one sixth with respect to control experiments without the pectinase treatment. Results showed that the insoluble pectic substances (protopectin) of the middle lamella of the bean shell and cotyledons were degraded by the pectinase activity, causing the loss of tissue coherence and leading to a soft texture of the cooked food (**Figure 8**) [59].
