Can freezing break up sugar polymers? I recently freezed a huge bunch of apple slices, and thawed them again a few days later. After thawing, I noticed a few things compared to a batch that I had put in the fridge (no freezing)


The apples turned brown far quicker
After pureeing, they tasted sweeter


I know that slow freezingg can destroy cell walls in animals due to crystallization. My guess what has happened here is that the same mechanism also broke up long chain sugar polymers. Thus the sugars are chemically more active, oxidize more easily after contact with air, and taste stronger than in the other batch.

But is my guess plausible? Do polymers actually break under those mechanical stresses? Is this or a similiar effect observed elsewhere?
Freezing breaks the cell structure of an apple, not individual chains of short polysaccharides you can feel the taste. What happens is probably enzymes which the apple contains in cell structures go out of these structures and split long polysaccharides (which have no taste) into short sugars which you feel as sweet.

In other words, the apple digest itself by its own enzyme systems after breaking the cell structures.