A STUDY ON PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT OF PUMMELO

Abstract

Pummelo, Citrus grandis is a member of the family citrus and produce the largest evercitrus fruit, which consist of important nutritional and medicinal values. Due to less usage in food processing industry pummelo fruit has been unfortunately discarded from the modern society. Therefore about 70% of the annual production is wasted with out being utilised. This situation implies, the need for practising food-processing technology on pummelo fruits. Pummelo fruits contain several bitter compounds such as Limonin, Naringin, etc. Presence of these bitter compounds is one of the major stumbling blocks in the process of manufacturing consumer preferable food products. The other major obstacle is that existing pummelo Population in Sri Lanka is extremely heterogeneous. Hence it is difficult to conduct food base experiments on pummelo. The type P4 of pummelo develop by the Department of Agriculture, Peradeniya was used for the experiments. During the study some important characteristics of fruit juice of type (variety) P4 was analysed. Attempts were plan to develop consumer preferable various food products such as Jelly marmalade, Ready-To-Serve fruit drink (R.T.S.), fresh cuts, and bottling of pummelo juice vesicles, by using pummelo fruits as the raw material. The recipes for marmalade and R.T.S. were developed according to the Sri Lanka Standards (SLS). Prepared marmalade consisted of fallowing characters: 81 0 Brix Total Soluble Solids (TSS), 0.64% Titrable Acidity (TA) and 1.05pH. And the R.T.S. comprised with 0.47% TA and 48ppm S 02 values. The study also focused on developing quality fresh cuts from pummelo fruits. These fresh cuts were stored under refrigerated conditions (10-15 °C) in a modified atmosphere with out^applying chemical preservatives. Variations of the important parameters such as the level of TSS, TA and Vitamin C content were studied within the 15 days of shelf life. Significant variations of above parameters were not recorded within 10 days of storage life and the results of sensory evaluations also recommended the fresh cuts. Bottling or canning of pummelo juice vesicles was also another scope of the study. It was found that bottled pummelo juice vesicles consisted of fallowing characters: 15.43 °Brix TSS, 1.47 pH and 0.698% TA. Pummelo R.T.S. and bottled juice vesicles were slightly bitter in taste; hence there is a need for further development of above products. Pummelo marmalade and fresh cuts were more successful among the proposed four products. Further sifudies should be carried out to find the nutritional losses during processing and storage of pummelo products and to find microbial safety and sensory quality improvement of the products