Abstract
(1) Background: Pistacia vera is a dry fruit spread all over the world, commonly known as pistachio, and is very appreciated as a snack, as a precious ingredient for confectionery industries and also as a blessed touch for gourmet dishes; (2) Methods: The simultaneous NMR profiles concerning the hydrophilic and hydrophobic phases, enabled by a specific throughput over grinded pistachio seeds, led to the comprehensive chemical characterization of these nuts coming from different territories; (3) Results: The customized extraction method is described in detail as well as the employed nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) experiments. The chemical quantification takes advantage from the innovative multi-assignment recovered analysis (MARA-NMR) technique able to provide experimentally robust panels for both hydrophobic and hydrophilic chemicals. Beyond the assessed repeatability and the interesting statistical discrimination, this paper adds information about the quantitative and qualitative composition of pistachio as inferred by NMR data. This updated background can pave the way toward the development of wider and wider chemical panels improving the knowledge about the pistachio’s composition. This approach can be easily extended to other matrices.
Highlights
Geographical and genetic characterization of food products is a key topic in order to protect aliments with specific history and quality from homologous goods belonging to different cultures and oversold in world markets [1]
This paper aims to study Pistacia vera samples by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) taking advantage on the chance to extract both water soluble and hydrophobic fractions; it leads to an easy obtainment of a comprehensive chemical analysis with two NMR studied phases for any starting raw material
The experimental protocol consists of a priming extraction over pistachio raw material using two immiscible phases: an aqueous phase for the extraction of polar compounds and a chloroform phase for the extraction of apolar compounds
Summary
Geographical and genetic characterization of food products is a key topic in order to protect aliments with specific history and quality from homologous goods belonging to different cultures and oversold in world markets [1]. Chemical studies on pistachio kernels mainly regarded the fatty acids and sterols content [8,9,10], whereas some targeted analyses concerned pigments, polyphenols and other aromatic species [11,12], all analyzed by chromatographic techniques. Among such previous studies, Arena et al [12] performed a nice comparison of pistachio samples coming from Iran, Turkey, California and Sicily in terms of the polyphenolic profile, elucidated by comprehensive two-dimensional liquid chromatography (LC × LC), obtaining a bidimensional map usable for a direct comparison. Longer analysis time, as well as analytical challenges related to system and method development are the main drawbacks
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