Flash freezing rapidly freezes food or biological tissue by exposing it to cryogenic temperatures or direct contact with liquid nitrogen at about minus 196 degrees Celsius. Rapid freezing creates far more nucleation sites than slow freezing, so many small ice crystals form throughout the food rather than the fewer, larger crystals that slow freezing produces, and those larger crystals are what damage cell walls and cause dehydration in slowly frozen food. Because it limits this cellular damage, flash freezing is widely used in the food industry to preserve food and is also studied in atmospheric science.
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