Freeze structuring unlocks minimal-processing strategies for legume texturization

Legumes are sustainable, nutrient-rich, and affordable, yet their potential remains underused because conventional food processing often fails to utilize the entire raw material or achieve desirable textures. Here, we demonstrate that whole-legume suspensions can be structured into gels with increased firmness and a distinct anisotropic architecture using directional freezing. The method leverages directional ice crystal growth to exclude legume components from the advancing ice phase, thereby redistributing them within aligned interstitial regions. Upon thawing, these concentrated domains interlink to form a continuous network, reinforcing the gel and generating anisotropic textures. This approach was successfully applied to legumes representing 96% of global production, including chickpeas, soybeans, peas, lentils, lupins, common beans, and mung beans, underscoring its versatility. By eliminating fractionation and additive use, freeze structuring offers a decentralized, sustainable solution for producing nutritious, texturized plant-based foods using standard freezing technologies, accessible for industrial and home-scale production worldwide.