New technological and technical solutions in dietary pear compote production

Abstract

Perfection of technological processes, both in preliminary preparation of raw materials and during the final mandatory step of pasteurization, plays a key role in ensuring the quality of finished products, which is important in the production of canned dietary products. The aim of the research was to develop a more efficient way of blanching raw materials with its hardware and soft pasteurization modes, which will allow the production of high quality and competitive compotes for functional nutrition. We have developed and proposed a method of pulse-steam blanching of raw materials directly in glass jars with saturated water vapor, instead of the traditional method using hot water. The essence of the method is as follows. Fruits stacked in jars are pulse heated for 100–160 seconds (depending on the volume of the container) with saturated water vapor with temperature of 105–110 °C, and then fed into jars with cycles of 10 and 10 seconds respectively. The use of pulsed supply of saturated water vapor contributes to achieving more even heating of the fruit, which are characterized by a relatively large internal thermal resistance, causing overheating of the surface layers, and also provides an increase in the temperature of the product, which allows to pour into the jars syrup at relatively high temperature (97–98 °C), while the traditional technology accounts for the temperature of only 80–85 °C. Implementation of this method ensures the temperature level of the product entering the pasteurization stage being 78–80 °C, as opposed to the traditional method, where the temperature of the product is 45–48 °C. After that, the jars will be filled with syrup with a temperature of 97–98 °C, sealed and sent for pasteurization on accelerated modes. To implement the new method of blanching, the design of the device for pulse-steam blanching of fruits in glass jars has been developed. New thermal sterilization regimes have been developed, taking into account the increased temperature of the product after sealing and improved technology for the production of pear compote. The results of physical and chemical testing confirm the high quality of the finished product.