Quality attributes of traditional food from blends of rice flour and jaggery syrup under different frying conditions

Abstract

Traditional foods are indigenous to the locality, and there are no standard preparation steps provided. Ariselu is a deep-fat fried product generally made up of rice flour and jaggery syrup. This study revealed the change in quality attributes of fried ariselu under various thicknesses (4 and 6 mm), frying temperature (150, 170 and 190 °C) and frying time (60, 90, 120 and 150 s). A full factorial design was considered and neural network clustering was employed to find the correlation among the responses obtained. Oil content was found to have an inverse relationship with moisture that increases with an increase in frying conditions. The lightness and yellowness values of ariselu decreased from 44.70 to 26.82 and 28.55 to 11.57, respectively. However, the redness value increased during frying due to increased browning reactions. The thermal properties were determined to analyze the changes in conductivity, resistivity, specific heat capacity and diffusivity during the frying of ariselu. The textural attributes of ariselu indicate an increased hardness value with a rise in frying temperature due to moisture loss in ariselu. The results obtained show that an overall acceptability (OAA) of 4.28/5 was achieved at 170 °C for 150 s with a 6 mm initial thickness. This research focuses on the optimum conditions required for frying ariselu with the desired quality attributes that would help the product establish in the commercial market.