Osmotic dehydration combined with freeze-drying of apple cubes and comparison with microwave drying and hot air drying

• Autor(a) principal: Assis, Fernanda Rosa
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Outros Autores: Morais, Rui Manuel Santos Costa de, Morais, Alcina Maria Miranda Bernardo de
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/26480
• topic: Osmotic treatment; Mathematical models; Water activity; Colour; Total phenolic content; Antioxidant activity

The effects of the pre-osmotic treatment on the mass transfer kinetics of the freeze-drying (FD) and on the water activity (aw) and the quality – colour, total phenolic content, antioxidant activity – of apple cubes were studied. The fit of the moisture content was carried out using several mathematical models. The comparison among FD, microwave drying (MWD) and hot air drying (HAD) of osmotically treated apple cubes was also performed according to the drying rate and the aw. The apple cubes were osmotically treated with 60ºBrix sucrose or sorbitol solutions at 60ºC, then frozen and freeze-dried. The FD reduced significantly the moisture content from 6.259, 1.086 and 1.031 to 0.138, 0.099 and 0.074 kgwater.kgdry matter-1 for the control and the samples osmotically pre-treated with sucrose and sorbitol, respectively. The modified Page’s model presented the highest precision of parameter estimates. The FD of samples osmotically pre-treated with the sucrose solution resulted in a higher drying rate than the others samples. The highest reduction in aw was observed in the fresh samples. After FD, the total phenolic content and the antioxidant activity of the osmotically pre-treated samples decreased around 80%, in comparison with the fresh apple, this reduction being due to the osmotic pre-treatment. The freeze-dried control samples achieved a lower aw in comparison with HAD and MWD. However, FD presented a lower drying rate.