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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

> Fresh or marinated meat: Iron in the myoglobin changes from ferrous to ferric and globin is denatured-the red color is lost.

For better or worse, it doesn't seem likely that the bioavailability is identical between ferrous and ferric iron. How significant are such changes? It'd be nice to see the results of some RCTs on rodents comparing this process to fresh and heat treated. I imagine high pressure would be nutritionally better or worse depending on the food.

Does anyone know if a 600 MPa pressure chamber, DIY or not, is within reach of a garden variety prepper?

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For DIY, micvac.com is safe and may fit to the meal-prep community very well.

The basic idea is a single-use valve based plastic package that lets you cook the food in a microwave in a closed container with an open valve(for steam release), but once it starts cooling, the valve closes,all bacteria are dead, the steam inside the package than condenses , creating low-pressure inside the package, similar to vacuum packing.

They describe the tech in their site, and in their patents.

Diy for it seems tough, you have engineer the right valve and package to ensure that every food, in every microwave , will get sterilized by the heat.

Considering that the yield strength of a lot of steels is at or below 600 MPa I wonder what these machines are made out of. If you wanted to make one yourself a 50 ton hydraulic press would generate the pressure needed but the seals that you would need for this are crazy to be food safe.

Home canning would do almost the same effect for much cheaper.

> A typical HPP process uses food products packaged in a high-barrier, flexible pouch or a plastic container.

If the pressure medium doesn't enter the pouch maybe it doesn't need to be food safe.

The machinery is very expensive and DIYing something with those pressures is very dangerous, since you're building a bomb. That's about 2000x the pressure inside a champagne bottle and 20x the pressure of a bomb.

For reference the Max cylinder pressure in an ice vehicle is 20 MPa iirc

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