Development And Evaluation Of Vacuum Fried Jackfruit Chips (Artocarpus heterophyllus )

Abstract

Jackfruit is a unique tropical fruit that has increased popularity worldwide in recent years for its immense health benefits as well as its texture and flavor. The high postharvest losses and the seasonal availability of jackfruit increase the scope of advanced processing technologies. Snack food market has registered an enormous growth among food processing sector in India. Deep fat fried products have a major share in snack food production sector. Frying, especially deep fat frying products is appealing in terms of color, aroma, texture and taste. The absence of suitable replacement for the taste of deep fat fried products increases the consumer demand for fried food products. Vacuum frying technology has a tremendous scope as an alternative to unhealthy atmospheric frying and is slowly becoming a buzz choice in snack food industry. The health benefits and the attractive physical properties such as color, crispiness, flavor etc. demands the consumer acceptance the vacuum fried chips. As the boiling point and smoke point is decreased due to the reduced pressure applied, thermal degradation of oil and loss of nutrients at high temperature can be checked. And the absence of oxygen during the process inhibits the lipid oxidation and enzymatic browning which helps to maintain the color and flavor of the raw feed. The vacuum frying system consists of two main chambers namely, frying chamber and oil storage chamber. A de-oiling system is attached to frying chamber to remove the oil content in the final vacuum fried product. This vacuum frying system used for the study was of batch type and had a capacity of 2 kg/ batch with oil tank storage of 30 L. After every batch of vacuum frying, chips and oil were collected for analysing the quality. The blended oil (rice bran and palm oil at 80:20) was used as frying oil and de-oiling was done at a speed of 1000 rpm for 5 min. Different pre-treatments were done for vacuum fried jackfruit chips. Control (Un-treated) sample had the best qualities with less oil content (33.35 %), moisture content (0.501 %), hardness (1.04 N), water activity (0.487). Quality parameters like moisture content, water activity, oil content, bulk density, true density, hardness, colour values of vacuum fried jackfruit chips were analysed at different frying conditions. The treatment condition at 100oC, and 9kPa vacuum for a duration of 20 min produced jackfruit chips with good quality parameters with less oil content(20.73%), hardness (1.04N), water activity (0.473), moisture content (0.481%), L* (70.18), a* (2.71) and b* (35.41). The retort pouches with band sealing retained the quality of jackfruit chips during the storage period. The TPC of blended oil was increased from 9.3% to 14.5% after 30th batch of vacuum frying, which is well below the threshold limit. The threshold level of TPC in edible oil was 25-27%. This made help to recommended for reuse the oil upto 30 times of vacuum frying.