PREPARATION AND QUALITY EVALUATION OF PAPAYA FRUIT LEATHER

Abstract

Papaya is one delicious tropical fruit abundantly cultivated in Sri Lanka, and they go under utilized or wasted extensively. The post harvest losses in pap::} a account for aii immense figure of 3C 10 40 %. Curtailing these losses is paramount importance to the country. Processing papaya into value added products at the locale itself by local small scale processor is one promising strategy. Processing papaya into fruit leather utilising surplus papaya is one of such strategy. This requires only simple technology and equipment and it can easily be adopted by local small scale processor. To disseminate this technology the processing parameters have to be optimised for high quality product. This study was directed to establish an optimum time, temperature and tray load relationship for the production papaya leather. A low temperature of 65° C was tested with different tray loads and it was found 7.5 mm thickness of tray load yields a satisfactory, malleable product.However, the results of the sensory evaluation performed to access the aroma, texture, taste and overall acceptance revealed, that papaya fruit leathers attained a flat flavour upon processing and, therefore, poor acceptability. However, the this study sufficiently encourages to warrants further researches on flavour enhancement and quality improvement of papaya fruit leather.