Sensory Acceptability of the Autochthonous Fruits of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

Introduction and background: Autochthonous fruits in Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H) represent great opportunities for fruit breeding, because they could be grown without costly agricultural inputs and offer valuable assets for the fruit processing industry providing a specific and different sensory taste for the fruit products. Hence, the objective of this study was to sensory evaluate fruits from 34 autochthonous apple and 29 pear cultivars in 2012 and 2013 from an ex-situ collection in B&H by eight trained panelists, using Quantitative Descriptive Analysis (QDA). Experimental: Flavour of fruits was described by the eight sensory attributes a) flavour: odour intensity, b) sweet, c) sour, d) green, fruit, e) floral flavour, f) typically, g) after taste and h) overall conception and subjected to principal component analysis (PCA) to visualise the sensory attributes. Results: For apple, the traditional cvs. ‘Prijedorska Zelenika’, ‘Paradija’, ‘Srebrenicka’, ‘Bukovija’ and ‘Ljepocvijetka’ reached the best flavour scores in both years, while in pear, cvs. ‘Takisa’, ‘Hambarka’, ‘Dolokrahan’ and ‘Kacmorka’ exhibited the best flavour in both years, followed by cvs. ‘Begarika’, ‘Jeribasma’, ‘Ahmetova’ and ‘Hambarka’ with intense floral flavour and odour. In these tastings, B & H grown apple cv. ‘Golden Delicious’ also scored highly compared with cvs ‘Idared’, ‘Granny Smith’ and ‘Gala’ with a lesser characteristic apple flavour and pear cvs ‘Williams’ and ‘Sweet Harrow’ scored better than ‘Alexander Lukas’ and ‘Gellerts’ from B & H.