Comparison of drying characteristic and uniformity of banana cubes dried by pulse-spouted microwave vacuum drying, freeze drying and microwave freeze drying

• Published in: Journal of the science of food and agriculture Vol. 94; no. 9; pp. 1827 - 1834
• Main Authors: Jiang, Hao, Zhang, Min, Mujumdar, Arun S, Lim, Rui-Xin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chichester, UK John Wiley & Sons, Ltd 01.07.2014; John Wiley and Sons, Limited
• Subjects: ascorbic acid; Ascorbic Acid - analysis; banana cubes; Bananas; Comparative analysis; Desiccation; Diet; Drying; drying characteristic; energy use and consumption; Food Handling - methods; Food preservation; Food science; Freeze Drying; Fruit - chemistry; heat treatment; Heating; Hot Temperature; Humans; microwave freeze drying; Microwave heating; Microwaves; Musa; Musa - chemistry; Nutrition research; Nutritive Value; Organic chemicals; pulse-spouted microwave vacuum drying; Shrinkage; Trends; uniformity; Vacuum; vacuum drying; Variability; uniformity; microwave freeze drying; freeze drying; banana cubes; drying characteristic; pulse-spouted microwave vacuum drying
• ISSN: 0022-5142; 1097-0010; 1097-0010
• DOI: 10.1002/jsfa.6501

BACKGROUND To overcome the flaws of high energy consumption of freeze drying (FD) and the non‐uniform drying of microwave freeze drying (MFD), pulse‐spouted microwave vacuum drying (PSMVD) was developed. RESULTS The results showed that the drying time can be dramatically shortened if microwave was used as the heating source. In this experiment, both MFD and PSMVD could shorten drying time by 50% as compared to the FD process. Depending on the heating method, MFD and PSMVD dried banana cubes showed trends of expansion while FD dried samples demonstrated trends of shrinkage. Shrinkage also brought intensive structure and highest fracturability of all three samples dried by different methods. The residual ascorbic acid content of PSMVD dried samples can be as high as in FD dried samples, which were superior to MFD dried samples. CONCLUSION The tests confirmed that PSMVD could bring about better drying uniformity than MFD. Besides, compared with traditional MFD, PSMVD can provide better extrinsic feature, and can bring about improved nutritional features because of the higher residual ascorbic acid content. © 2013 Society of Chemical Industry