Topik Utama

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Drying vs tempreature

After getting a bunch of new samples, I decided to delve in the drying methods of the chiku. Previously, I've tried air drying out in the open and cabinet drying, both in room temperature. But there are a few setbacks in this method, such as the long time that increases the susceptibility to airborne fungi contamination. Thus, as I found out in the previous post, there are many temperatures and settings that can be used to dry the cut fruit. Therefore I studied different temperatures that is most effective to dry a sample, as in the research of Chien et al, 2009.

Three samples of similar maturity (around 1kg per temperature) is peeled, sliced and oven-dried into constant weight. Three temperatures are used--50, 60, and 70. The time of drying, yield, and properties is as follows.

According to the Chien study, higher temperatures can give better antioxidant activity. This is the exact opposite of some other fruit drying results such as Larrauri et al, (1997), Garau et al (2007), and Shiau, Wu and Chang (2012); but similar to results of Madrau et al, (2008), where its antioxidant components slightly increase. Although in this study, it claims that 60C does not change much of the fruits' properties.

Therefore, I shall use the middle tempreature of 60C for drying. Although I need to make sure there are less gummy samples after drying.